Unobtrusive Vital Sign Acquisition in the Domain of AAL

Addressing applications in the area of Ambient Assisted Living, this contribution presents a new kind of unobtrusive, and non-stigmatizing, continuous measurement of vital signs as respiratory rate by the observation and analysis of surrogating signals caused by interdependencies between ultra-wideband radar signals and altering target locations and coherent shapes e.g. the upheaval of the breast or contraction of a muscle. The key part of the approach is based on a mixture of techniques of pre-processing, feature extraction and information fusion including the context aware interpretation for the treatment of multidimensional reflection data sets from the UWB-sensor node. After a brief introduction to the application context including an explanation of specific user demands, physical fundamentals of measurement and utilized electronics, the applied principles of spatial and temporal data mining are described including meaningful experiments.