Monitoring of human cardio-pulmonary activity by multi-channel UWB-radar

A medical application of ultra-wideband radar is proposed where it is used for monitoring motion of internal organs, especially due to respiration and heart beat. This provides complementary information, e.g. for improved cardiac magnetic resonance imaging. To this end, a blind source separation is applied to decompose the multitude of physiological signatures after selecting a region of interest in the received UWB-data. By extending our radar system to multiple channels we have established more favorable conditions for the solution of this ill-conditioned problem. The diagnostic potential of the cardiac motion component by UWB-radar is shown by a time-domain comparison with corresponding electrocardiograms and in a setup where the heart´s left and the right functional parts were illuminated simultaneously.