Non-invasive cardiovascular and vital signs monitoring techniques: review, challenges, and perspectives

• Reviewed emerging contactless, distraction-free cardiovascular monitoring solutions. • Evaluated methods across eight dimensions: efficiency, safety, reliability, and more. • Highlighted key values, faced challenges, and opportunities of these techniques. • Discussed how advanced processing methods tackle challenges of poor signal quality. Cardiovascular diseases are the leading cause of global fatalities, necessitating effective diagnostic solutions. Traditional methods, while valuable, often require invasive procedures or require subjects to remain stationary, limiting their real-time monitoring capability in dynamic environments. This article reviews the emerging field of contactless and distraction-free cardiovascular monitoring, which offers distraction-free, flexible, and user-friendly alternatives for enhanced accessibility. We examine various techniques, including radar-based methods, optical measurements, ballistocardiography, contactless electrocardiogram (ECG), and wearable devices, comparing their working principles, advantages, and limitations against traditional diagnosis methods. The novelty of this review lies in its comprehensive evaluation of these methods across eight key dimensions, including application breadth, time efficiency, reliability, distraction-free operation, safety, bandwidth, information value, and working distance. Another new perspective involves how advanced hardware, digital filters, and artificial intelligence (AI)-driven signal processing methods address challenges associated with relatively poor signal quality. Additionally, this article discusses these techniques’ key values on healthcare, challenges, and emerging opportunities.