A Contactless Respiration Monitoring System Using FMCW Radar

Project Motivation and Problem Statement: Describe the real-world problem or need your project addresses. Explain why this problem is important from an engineering, societal, environmental, or economic perspective. Engineering Approach and Methods: Summarize the technical approach used to address the problem. This may include system design, modeling, simulation, experimental methods, algorithms, materials selection, manufacturing processes, or validation techniques. Design Implementation: Describe the implemented solution or prototype. Highlight key design features, subsystems, or innovations, and explain how the design meets project requirements or constraints. Results and Performance Evaluation: Summarize key results, testing outcomes, or performance metrics that you have as of today's submission date. If quantitative results are available, include them. If testing is ongoing, describe expected performance and evaluation methods. Impact and Applications: Discuss the broader impact of your project, including potential applications, scalability, sustainability considerations, or future development. The project is about designing a non-contact system for the monitoring of human breathing. The system uses a mmWave radar sensor. The system detects and measures the rate of breathing of a person from about six feet away. The system uses a type of radar known as FMCW or Frequency Modulated Continuous Wave. The system also uses phase-based signal processing. It is non-contact and thus allows for comfortable, clean, and remote human body part monitoring. The IWR6843 chip is a single chip that contains a 60 GHz radar front end, ADC, MCU, and DSP. This allows for real-time data capture. The system detects small movements of the human chest and uses digital filtering and spectral analysis techniques. The system may also use a small amount of machine learning. The final prototype will demonstrate real-time respiration rate estimation with quantitative validation against manual counting or reference measurements. The system is intended for applications such as home health monitoring, sleep analysis, and contactless patient observation. This project evaluates system feasibility, signal processing performance, and design constraints while maintaining a portable and cost-effective architecture suitable for academic implementation.