Breathing is one of the body\'s most basic functions and abnormal breathing can indicate underlying cardiopulmonary problems. Monitoring respiratory abnormalities can help with early detection and reduce the risk of cardiopulmonary diseases. In this study, a 77 GHz frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) millimetre-wave (mmWave) radar was used to detect different types of respiratory signals from the human body in a non-contact manner for respiratory monitoring (RM). To solve the problem of noise interference in the daily environment on the recognition of different breathing patterns, the system utilised breathing signals captured by the millimetre-wave radar. Firstly, we filtered out most of the static noise using a signal superposition method and designed an elliptical filter to obtain a more accurate image of the breathing waveforms between 0.1 Hz and 0.5 Hz. Secondly, combined with the histogram of oriented gradient (HOG) feature extraction algorithm, K-nearest neighbours (KNN), convolutional neural network (CNN), and HOG support vector machine (G-SVM) were used to classify four breathing modes, namely, normal breathing, slow and deep breathing, quick breathing, and meningitic breathing. The overall accuracy reached up to 94.75%. Therefore, this study effectively supports daily medical monitoring.

Radars can be used as sensors to detect the breathing of victims trapped under layers of building materials in catastrophes like earthquakes or gas explosions. In this contribution, we present the implementation of a novel frequency comb continuous wave (FCCW) bioradar module using a commercial software-defined radio (SDR). The FCCW radar transmits multiple equally spaced frequency components simultaneously. The data acquisition of the received combs is frequency domain-based. Hence, it does not require synchronization between the transmit and receive channels, as time domain-based broadband radars, such as ultra wideband (UWB) pulse radar and frequency-modulated CW (FMCW) radar, do. Since a frequency comb has an instantaneous wide bandwidth, the effective scan rate is much higher than that of a step frequency CW (SFCW) radar. This FCCW radar is particularly suitable for small motion detection. Using inverse fast Fourier transform (IFFT), we can decompose the received frequency comb into different ranges and remove ghost signals and interference of further range intervals. The frequency comb we use in this report has a bandwidth of only 60 MHz, resulting in a range resolution of up to 2.5 m, much larger than respiration-induced chest wall motions. However, we demonstrate that in the centimeter range, motions can be detected and evaluated by processing the received comb signals. We want to integrate the bioradar into an unmanned aircraft system for fast and safe search and rescue operations. As a trade-off between ground penetrability and the size and weight of the antenna and the radar module, we use 1.3 GHz as the center frequency. Field measurements show that the proposed FCCW bioradar can detect an alive person through different nonmetallic building materials.

Timely detection and elimination of surface condensation is crucial for diverse applications in agriculture, automotive, oil and gas industries, and respiratory monitoring. In this paper, a smart patch based on a ZnO/aluminum (∼5 μm/50 μm thick) flexible Lamb wave device has been proposed to detect, prevent, and eliminate condensation, which can be realized using both of its surfaces. The patch is operated using a machine-learning algorithm which consists of data preprocessing (feature selection and optimization) and model training by a random forest algorithm. It has been tested in six cases, and the results show good detection performance with average precision = 94.40% and average F1 score = 93.23%. The principle of accelerating evaporation is investigated to understand the elimination and prevention functions for surface condensation. Results show that both dielectric heating and acoustothermal effect have their contributions, whereas the former is found more dominant. Furthermore, the functional relationship between the evaporation rate and the input power is calibrated, showing a high linearity (R2 = 97.64%) with a slope of ∼3.6 × 10-5 1/(s·mW). With an input power of ∼0.6 W, the flexible device has been proven effective in the prevention of condensation.

An electrically small patch antenna with a low-cost high-permittivity ceramic substrate material for use in a ground-penetrating radar is proposed in this work. The antenna is based on a commercial ceramic 915 MHz patch antenna with a size of 25 × 25 × 4 mm3 and a weight of 12.9 g. The influences of the main geometric parameters on the antenna\'s electromagnetic characteristics were comprehensively studied. Three bandwidth improvement techniques were sequentially applied to optimize the antenna: tuning the key geometric parameters, adding cuts on the edges, and adding parasitic radiators. The designed antenna operates at around 1.3 GHz and has more than 40 MHz continuous -3 dB bandwidth. In comparison to the original antenna, the -3 and -6 dB fractional bandwidth is improved by 1.8 times and 4 times, respectively. Two antennas of the proposed design together with a customized radar were installed on an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) for a quick search for survivors after earthquakes or gas explosions without exposing the rescue staff to the uncertain dangers of moving on the debris.