Non-invasive respiration monitoring sensor using UWB-IR

Ultra-wideband impulse-radio (UWB-IR) has lately attracted considerable attention as remote medical sensor, since the effective range is in the order of a few meters and it is not affected by clothes or blankets as well. It is therefore expected to detect the respiratory movement of human body such as patient, which is unique as compared with conventional sensors. It is also friendly to the environment including the human body due to the very low electromagnetic energy emission. However, high speed A/D device should be required to detect the small respiratory displacement using a ranging based approach. This paper suggests a remote respiration sensing scheme using the UWB-IR. It also makes possible to design the simultaneous sensing of multiple persons in hospital beds, for example. In this paper the measurements were conducted for various scenarios and the feasibility is discussed.