Abstract
In this thesis, we develop an ultra-wideband (UWB) pulse radar system for non-contact vital sign detection such as respiration or heartbeats rates. The system can be applied for wireless healthcare monitoring or life identification. The transmitter generates and sends 10-GSamples/s periodic Gaussian pulses towards the person under monitoring. The pulses arrive at the person and reflect back to the receiver. The receiver samples the reflected signal in RF domain directly by time-interleaved sampling. The 16-channel time-interleaved analog-to-digital converters (TIADC) lead to equivalent sampling rate of 20-GSamples/s. The respiration information and heartbeats information are captured in the reflected signal and is processed by the system. We have developed a scheme at the receiver to post-process the signals efficiently and extract the respiration rate and the heartbeats rate successively. Furthermore, the proposed scheme does not require prior knowledge of the pulse waveform and save the calibration for TIADC. The numerical evaluation based on the root-mean-square deviations (RMSD) of the estimated respiration rate and the estimated heartbeat rate is also presented. In the final part, a real prototype based on the proposed scheme is implemented for the real-time demonstration.