Measuring Heartbeats With Radar

Placing sensors on your body to measure your heartbeat can be inconvenient, so researchers have created a radar-based system that can do it remotely.

AsianScientist (Feb. 4, 2016) – Researchers in Japan have come up with a way to remotely measure heartbeats in real time and under controlled conditions, with as much accuracy as electrocardiographs—eliminating the need to place sensors on the body.

They say their radar-based device will allow for the development of “casual sensing”—taking measurements as people go about their daily activities; for instance, when they are going to bed or getting ready to start the day. The team hopes that the added convenience of remote sensing will be an incentive for people to monitor their health status for their own benefit.

“Taking measurements with sensors on the body can be stressful and troublesome, because you have to stop what you’re doing,” said Hiroyuki Sakai, a researcher at Panasonic who collaborated with researchers at Kyoto University Center of Innovation.

“What we tried to make was something that would offer people a way to monitor their body in a casual and relaxed environment.”

The technology utilizes spread-spectrum radar to catch signals from the body and an algorithm that distinguishes heartbeats from other signals. Credit: Kyoto University
The technology utilizes spread-spectrum radar to catch signals from the body and an algorithm that distinguishes heartbeats from other signals. Credit: Kyoto University

The remote sensing system combines millimeter-wave spread-spectrum radar technology and a unique signal analysis algorithm that identifies signals from the body.

“Heartbeats aren’t the only signals the radar catches. The body sends out all sorts of signals at once, including breathing and body movement. It’s a chaotic soup of information,” said professor of Communications and Computer Engineering at Kyoto University, Toru Sato.

“Our algorithm differentiates all of that. It extracts waves characteristic of heartbeats from the radar signal and calculates their intervals.”

The team hopes that the remote sensing system, with further experimentation, will be put to practical use in the near future.

“Now that we know that remote sensing is possible, we’ll need to make the measurement ability more robust so that the system can monitor subjects in various age ranges and in many different contexts,” Sato said.

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Source: Kyoto University; Photo: Shutterstock.
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