A contactless system for continuous vital sign monitoring in palliative and intensive care

Vital sign monitoring systems play a crucial role in the medical environment. Patients in palliative and intensive care can especially benefit from continuous observation by detecting sudden changes in health status allowing the medical staff to promptly provide intensified symptom amelioration at the end-of-life. However, machine based monitoring like electrocardiography requires the patient being permanently wired to the device. This circumstance severely restricts the independence and mobility of the patient, leading to a decrease in the quality of life. For this reason, palliative care stations currently usually avoid continuous monitoring. This paper presents a novel approach by using a single radar system to perform continuous and above all contactless monitoring of respiration and heartbeat. A continuous wave radar using the Six-Port technology is introduced and its feasibility, performance and real-time capability are validated in long-term measurements on different test persons. In comparison to gold standard reference devices a correlation of 97.6% was achieved.