Non-contact Heartbeat Detection Based on Beam Diversity Using Multibeam Doppler Sensor

Heartbeat detection is a promising technology for health care and is in great demand in many applications. For non-contact and non-invasive heartbeat detection, Doppler sensor-based heartbeat detection methods have been investigated extensively. However, since the conventional methods use a single beam Doppler sensor, the accuracy of heartbeat detection tends to degrade, when the SNR (Signal-to-Noise Ratio) of heartbeat components for the beam direction is low. In this paper, we propose a non-contact heartbeat detection method based on beam diversity using a multibeam Doppler sensor. The effects of noises and the corresponding SNRs of heartbeat components over the received signal differ from one beam to another. Based on this fact, the proposed method detects heartbeat by exploiting beam diversity of the received signals. The experimental results showed that compared to the detection method using a single beam, our proposed method using multiple beams detected heartbeat accurately, which indicates that exploiting the beam diversity can lead to the improvement of heartbeat detection accuracy.