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Date:  Wed, August 13, 2014
Time:  11:00 am
Location:  Holmes Hall 389
Speaker:  Mehran Baboli, candidate for PhD, advisor: Victor Lubecke

The goal of this research is to evaluate the feasibility and limitations for radar based measurement of a subject’s respiratory activity and diagnosis of respiratory disorders during sleep. Two approaches were identified for dealing with a subject’s extraneous motion. First, a Pulse Based Radar (PBR) was evaluated through simulation for efficacy in measuring respiratory rate for a walking subject. Moreover, a new algorithm was developed based on wavelet transform to experimentally measure heart and respiration rate using PBR. The research showed the complexity of detecting respiration rate when a target is not sedentary, especially in the case of random activity. A second approach was also explored, where radar was used to identify sedentary and non-sedentary states, and measure and assess respiratory activity only for the sedentary condition. The design of a CW radar suitable for this application involved more than 200 experiments used to select the best tradeoff between antenna sizes, pattern, transmit power and range. Further CW radar research included optimization for long range measurement of heart and respiration rate and identification and detection of live subjects, including the successful measurement of heart and respiration of a human subject at distance 21 and 69 meters, respectively. The CW radar is designed to be applied to sleep study patients to assess the value of radar to replicate or supplement the analysis provided by conventional sleep monitoring sensors and techniques. New hardware and diagnostic algorithms are proposed to diagnose sleep disorders through integration with a conventional (Sandman) sleep monitoring system.