Respiration and Heart Rate Estimation Using FMCW Radar on the Continuum

We present a classical signal processing based solution for breathing rate and heart rate estimation of a human being using measurements from a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar. The proposed solution jointly estimates the respiration rate and its higher order harmonics, as well as the heart rate using the Newtonized orthogonal matching pursuit (NOMP) algorithm on the continuous line. Our simulation results demonstrate that the proposed solution significantly outperforms the benchmark Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) based estimation algorithm in terms of the root mean-squared error (RMSE). We also demonstrate the application of the proposed algorithm on real data captured using the Infineon Technologies 60 GHz FMCW radar BGT60TR13C development board where similar performance improvement is observed.