Title:  Noncontact Seismocardiogram Signal Detection using Microwave Doppler Radar

Committee:

Dr. Ying Zhang, ECE, Chair , Advisor

Dr. Gregory Durgin, ECE

Dr. Omer Inan, ECE

Dr. Andrew Peterson, ECE

Dr. Yang Wang, CEE

Abstract:

The objective of the research is to achieve non-contact detection of a cardiac signal seismocardiogram (SCG) using microwave Doppler radar system. The development of the health monitoring brings an increasing demand on robust, reliable and accurate remote detection of cardiac signal. Based on the ability to penetrate non-metal obstacles, microwave Doppler radar is promising to provide a non-contact and unobtrusive measurement. To detect an accurate and reliable cardiac signal, both the hardware system and the signal processing approaches are developed. First, a noise suppression scheme and a clutter removal strategy are investigated to improve the performance of a microwave Doppler radar system. Then, further investigation on detected radar signal is conducted to verify that it can represent the cardiac signal SCG, and a method is developed to independently extract the SCG features from radar signal without using a contact electrocardiogram (ECG) signal that conventional methods rely on. With the investigations on hardware system and signal processing approaches, the complete non-contact detection and evaluation of cardiac healthiness can be achieved.