Heartbeat and breathing rate detection using 6GHz FMCW radar

The rapid advancement of ubiquitous sensing technologies has opened new opportunities for enabling smart home environments that can continuously and unobtrusively monitor human health. Among these technologies, contactless vital sign monitoring has gained significant attention due to its potential for improving healthcare accessibility, supporting elderly care, and enabling early detection of medical conditions. Traditional monitoring methods often rely on wearable devices or wired medical sensors, which may be intrusive, uncomfortable, or inconvenient for long-term use. In contrast, wireless sensing solutions based on radar can provide a seamless, non-contact approach for tracking vital signs such as breathing rate and heartbeat rate, making them particularly valuable for continuous health monitoring in everyday settings.

In this project, we developed a 6 GHz Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave (FMCW) radar system capable of accurately detecting vital signs in real time. The principle behind this system is that radio signals are subtly affected by physiological activities: inhaling and exhaling induce periodic chest wall movements, while heartbeats generate minute skin vibrations. By transmitting continuous wave signals that sweep across a frequency band and analyzing the reflected signals, the FMCW radar can capture these small variations in distance and phase, thereby enabling the extraction of breathing and heartbeat patterns without requiring any physical contact with the subject.

The design of our system integrates both hardware and software components to achieve robust performance. The radar hardware is responsible for transmitting and receiving signals, while the digital front end digitizes the reflected signals for processing. On the software side, a dedicated signal processing pipeline is employed to separate low-frequency breathing components from the higher-frequency heartbeat-induced vibrations, ensuring accurate detection of both vital signs even in the presence of environmental noise. Advanced filtering and spectral analysis techniques further enhance the system’s ability to distinguish between different physiological signals and suppress interference.

To validate the proposed system, we implemented a fully functional FMCW radar prototype and demonstrated its effectiveness in real-world conditions. The system is capable of performing real-time measurements of breathing and heartbeat rates, with results displayed continuously for monitoring purposes. The accompanying video demonstration highlights the practicality of our design, showing that vital signs can be reliably tracked without the need for wearable sensors or specialized medical equipment. This work illustrates how radar-based sensing can play an important role in future smart healthcare systems, offering a contactless, reliable, and scalable solution for continuous monitoring of human well-being.