Bioengineering (Jan 2023)

Contactless Stethoscope Enabled by Radar Technology

  • Isabella Lenz,
  • Yu Rong,
  • Daniel Bliss

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3390/bioengineering10020169
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 10, no. 2
p. 169

Abstract

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Contactless vital sign measurement technologies have the potential to greatly improve patient experiences and practitioner safety while creating the opportunity for comfortable continuous monitoring. We introduce a contactless alternative for measuring human heart sounds. We leverage millimeter wave frequency-modulated continuous wave radar and multi-input multi-output beamforming techniques to capture fine skin vibrations that result from the cardiac movements that cause heart sounds. We discuss contact-based heart sound measurement techniques and directly compare the radar heart sound technique with these contact-based approaches. We present experimental cases to test the strengths and limitations of both the contact-based measurement techniques and the contactless radar measurement. We demonstrate that the radar measurement technique is a viable and potentially superior method for capturing human heart sounds in many practical settings.

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