Contactless radar-based breathing monitoring of premature infants in the neonatal intensive care unit

Vital sign monitoring systems are essential in the care of hospitalized neonates. Due to the immaturity of their organs and immune system, premature infants require continuous monitoring of their vital parameters and sensors need to be directly attached to their fragile skin. Besides mobility restrictions and stress, these sensors often cause skin irritation and may lead to pressure necrosis. In this work, we show that a contactless radar-based approach is viable for breathing monitoring in the Neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). For the first time, different scenarios common to the NICU daily routine are investigated, and the challenges of monitoring in a real clinical setup are addressed through different contributions in the signal processing framework. Rather than just discarding measurements under strong interference, we present a novel random body movement mitigation technique based on the time-frequency decomposition of the recovered signal. In addition, we propose a simple and accurate frequency estimator which explores the harmonic structure of the breathing signal. As a result, the proposed radar-based solution is able to provide reliable breathing frequency estimation, which is close to the reference cabled device values most of the time. Our findings shed light on the strengths and limitations of this technology and lay the foundation for future studies toward a completely contactless solution for vital signs monitoring.