Non-Contact Vital Sign Monitoring of Cat Using Continuous-Wave Doppler Radar

Recently, the health of pets has received widespread attention. Monitoring the vital signs of pets is critical for their health assessments and disease diagnoses. The existing techniques such as the electrocardiogram (ECG) and auscultation require contact with pets, hair removal, or even surgical implants, which inevitably cause discomfort and stress to the pets. In this paper, a novel non-contact vital sign monitoring method using continuous-wave (CW) doppler radar was performed on the pets. The theoretical analysis of vital sign monitoring of CW radar is explained, and a custom-designed 24 GHz radar system is proposed to validate the effectiveness of the vital sign monitoring. Experiments in the laboratory environment are conducted to detect the respiration and heartbeat of the cat. The experimental results show that the proposed radar system could successfully capture the respiration and heartbeat of the cat. The proposed method has the potential in scenarios such as pet health assessment and disease diagnoses.