A research team from the University of Waterloo in Canada is using radar technology to monitor the health of drivers while they are at the wheel.

With the goal of making health checks easier, the team is using a radar that is smaller than a USB thumb drive incorporated into the vehicle cabin. The radar, according to the researchers, sends out signals that detect human vibrations, which are subsequently sent back to the radar. Meanwhile, an on-board artificial intelligence (AI) system is designed to collect and analyze that data so that it can construct a medical overview of the driver and identify any potential conditions. Once the driver completes his or her commute, the system will autonomously send a report directly to the driver’s cell phone for review.

Source: University of Waterloo

The research team explained that this radar technology can detect small movements such as the rise and fall of a chest from breathing or heartbeats. Further, the technology can also identify changes in those breathing patterns or heart rhythms that might be associated with potential health issues related to cardiovascular conditions such as tachycardia and bradycardia or respiratory system conditions such as tachypnea, bradypnea and apnea.

"We focused on enhancing data extraction for exact information related to people's respiratory and cardiovascular systems and teaching the AI how to make medical interpretations from this data. Another important consideration was personal privacy and security — no data is stored on the cloud; it is sent to the monitored person's cellphone only," the researchers added.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the radar technology, a series of tests was conducted using synthetic data, wherein study participants mimicked respiratory conditions' symptoms by holding their breath and taking shallow breaths. The system, according to the team, accurately detected and interpreted respiratory conditions during those trials. Similarly, the system also successfully detected and identified heart conditions during tests using patients with actual heart conditions.

In the future, the researchers will work to enable such diagnostics for all vehicle passengers.

The technology is detailed in the article, “Multibin Breathing Pattern Estimation by Radar Fusion for Enhanced Driver Monitoring,” which appears in the journal IEEE Transactions on Instrumentation and Measurement