Numerical Modeling of Radar-based Vital Sign Detection in Debris Sites for Sparse Frequency Excitations

In earthquake emergencies, rapid rescue operations are crucial for survival. To enhance survivor detection, a radar-based vital sign detection device was developed in previous research, based on the detection of thoracic chest movement via Doppler shifts. To systematically determine the measurement quality of this system, establishing an efficient simulation environment is necessary. In this contribution, we propose a simulation method based on the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) approach for an excitation signal with a sparse frequency domain representation. The numerical simulations are carried out in the open-source FDTD simulation software gprMax. The approach is validated with a frequency-comb excitation featuring range detection capabilities for a series of radar distances in the range 1 m to 12 m.