26th IEEE Signal Processing and Communications Applications Conference (SIU), İzmir, Turkey, 2 - 05 May 2018
In this paper, a new method that uses radio frequency (RF) communications signal is proposed for the contactless respiration rate estimation and monitoring. In the proposed method, the phase difference between the channels of the two-channel radio receiver is used instead of the change of the RF signal amplitude with the respiration, unlike the methods in the literature. It is expected that the phase data is less affected by the environmental interferences according to the amplitude data. The subspace based MUSIC algorithm is firstly applied for the estimation of respiration rate using the change of phase difference data. The real measurements that are taken with software defined radios in laboratory, are used to validate the functionality of the proposed method. It is shown with the experimental results that the proposed MUSIC method outperforms the power spectral density based methods for the respiration rate estimation.