A health monitoring system with posture estimation and heart rate detection based on millimeter-wave radar

Millimeter-wave radar is a device gaining popularity in many applications such as occupancy detection and people counting, vital sign detection and robotics. It has recently been used for human detection and tracking within home health care as a potential application area. Furthermore, increasing number of researchers utilize mmWave radar for heart rate detection. In this paper, we introduce a new home health monitoring system based on millimeter-wave radar, which is composed of posture estimation and heart rate detection. We focus on categorization of postures (standing, sitting and lying) for a single person in indoor environments. When the person is estimated as lying down, our system can further detect the heart rate. We establish a new point cloud dataset and show that, with simple algorithms employed, the system has an accuracy of around 99% for posture estimation and approximately 91% accuracy for detecting heart rate with only a single millimeter-wave radar.