Noise Considerations for Remote Detection of Life Signs with Microwave Doppler Radar

This paper describes and quantifies three main sources of baseband noise affecting physiological signals in a direct conversion microwave Doppler radar for life signs detection. They are thermal noise, residual phase noise, and Flicker noise. In order to increase the SNR of physiological signals at baseband, the noise floor, in which the Flicker noise is the most dominant factor, needs to be minimized. This paper shows that with the consideration of the noise factor in our Doppler radar, Flicker noise canceling techniques may drastically reduce the power requirement for heart rate signal detection by as much as a factor of 100.