Continuous vital sign monitoring has become a topic of interest in recent years as behaviour change has become a great part of health improvement. In this study we were using a 10.5 GHz Doppler radar to extract the heart rate and respiration rate of subjects during resting positions.
We chose 6 postures which are able to represent the postures that might occurs during resting, which are sitting up straight, sitting leaning forward, sitting leaning backward, lying supine, lying lateral and lying prone. We then compare the measurement results for each posture.
To isolate the signal within the frequency band of interest, we apply frequency range filtering to the signal. We then retrieve the heart rate and respiration rate using prominent frequency method and zero crossing peak count method. We then asses the two methods by comparing the difference between the retrieved signals from the radar to the reference signal.
From this study we understand that there are subtle performance change for different postures.We also found that the two retrieval methods gave an acceptable performance with their own characteristics, with prominent frequency method giving better results.