Radar and Wireless Channel State Information for Non-contact and Continuous Physiological Monitoring
Date: Wed, May 13, 2026
Time: 11:00am - 12:00pm
Location: POST 221; online available, check your email or contact the ECE office.
Speaker: Jannatun Noor Sameera, candidate for PhD, advisors: Dr. Olga Boric-Lubecke
ECE Graduate Students: This will count towards your seminar credit.
Abstract
Contactless physiological sensing using Doppler radar and wireless communication signals offers a privacy-preserving and unobtrusive alternative to conventional body-worn sensors for long-term health monitoring. However, accurate recovery of physiological information remains challenging because cardiac and respiratory micro-motions are extremely small and easily corrupted by hardware imperfections, motion artifacts, respiration harmonics, and subject-dependent thoraco-abdominal biomechanics. This dissertation advances contactless health sensing by presenting: (i) a high-accuracy signal processing method for heart rate variability (HRV) estimation from CW radar using arctangent demodulation, wavelet-based filtering, and template matching; (ii) a millimeter-wave OFDM sensing approach that uses channel-state-information subcarrier selection and automated template design to improve HRV sensing; (iii) study and quantification of thoraco-abdominal asynchrony that explains distortion in radar respiratory signatures introducing metrics for identifying reliable breathing segments; and (iv) computationally efficient processing method along with a compact 24 GHz real-time system for fall detection, activity classification, and caregiver alerting. Taken together, these contributions connect physiological micro-motion sensing with practical macro-motion monitoring and provide a strong foundation for contactless physiological monitoring and safer aging-in-place.
Biography
Jannatun Noor Sameera received B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronic Engineering from the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh, in 2018 and 2020, respectively, and is currently pursuing a Ph.D. degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. Her research interests include physiological signal processing and sensors, gait and fall risk assessment, and wireless health monitoring systems. She is a recipient of multiple awards, including the Office of Vice Provost Student Excellence in Research Award (2026), Outstanding Ph.D. Student Award (2025), 2nd place at UH Venture Competition (2025), and the Patents2Products Fellowship (2024, 2026) at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. She is actively engaged with IEEE Women In Engineering as the Vice Chair, where the group received the IEEE Region 6 Outstanding Affinity Group (WIE) Chapter of the Year in 2024.