Ambient assisted living electromagnetic sensor for continuous breathing monitoring applied to movement analysis: a preliminary study

The aim of this paper is to investigate the capabilities of a novel electromagnetic technique designed for contactless monitoring of breathing activity in Ambient Assisted Living applications. The method is based on the transmission of a frequency sweep and the measurement of the reflection coefficient to determine the respiration rate of a subject. To date, the method is under optimization, but it has already shown interesting capabilities for calculating not only the respiration rate, but also additional features, as the position of the subject inside a room and his/her movements. After a brief mathematical introduction of the algorithm, some preliminary tests are presented concerning the monitoring of a human target inside a room. These first results clearly show the capability of the method to detect the subject, his breathing rate, position and physical activity. Of course further signal processing is required in order to distinguish between different types of movements and to classify them.