Noncontact Vital Sign Monitoring Using IR-UWB Radar

Background: Contact sensors can cause injuries and infections in newborn infants with fragile skin. The impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB) radar is recently demonstrated in adults as a contactless method to measure heart rate. The purpose of this study is to assess heart rate (HR) in neonates using IR-UWB radar and evaluate its accuracy, compared to the electrocardiogram (ECG) in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). Methods: HR is recorded in newborn infants using both IR-UWB radar 35 cm away from the chest and ECG simultaneously in the NICU. The HR data during sleeping/calm state are automatically collected by a software algorithm. A total values averaged from a 30-second window every 10 s is used for the analysis. Data acquired on the same patient with standard electrocardiogram has been used for comparison.