A Low Cost Through-Wall Radar for Vital Signs Monitoring

For civil and military surveillance applications, a remote through-wall radar offers more practical solution compared to the conventional wired methods. For example, it helps emergency and military personnel to quickly detect tiny movements of limbs, breathing, or heartrate in a complex environment such as a collapsed building. This paper describes a low cost through-wall radar for monitoring vital signs. Three test cases along with their results are presented. Testing highlights the challenges of isolating human movement through various materials along with effectiveness of the proposed system in identifying human movements.