Driver Vital Signs Monitoring Using Millimeter Wave Radio

As automobiles have become an essential part to facilitate our daily life, advanced driver assistance systems (ADASs) have been gaining more and more interest in assisting drivers to enhance both safety and convenience. To respond timely in case of an emergency, ADAS needs to keep track of the driver’s health/consciousness, which is generally achieved by monitoring the driver’s vital signs, including respiration rate (RR), heart rate (HR), and heart rate variability (HRV). However, most of the state-of-art solutions need to assume that the human is stationary, which does not hold in practical driving scenarios. To tackle the problem, we propose a novel system, which can estimate driver’s RR, HR, and interbeat intervals (IBIs) in the presence of driver’s motion artifacts using commercial millimeter-wave (mmWave) radio. The system consists of two key components. First, to extract the reflection signals containing vital signals, the motion artifacts are first removed by a novel motion compensation module, followed by the periodicity check to identify the components with vital signals. Second, the respiration and heartbeat signals are reconstructed by jointly optimizing the decomposition of all the extracted compound vital signals over different range-azimuth bins. We evaluate the system performance in a real driving environment and investigate the impact of different parameters, including the device locations, pavement conditions, and motion types. The experimental results show that the proposed system can achieve a median error of 0.16 respiration per minute (RPM), 0.82 beat per minute (BPM), and 46 ms for RR, HR, and IBI estimations, corresponding to the relative accuracy of 99.17%, 98.94%, and 94.11%, respectively.