Feasibility of Dual UWB Heart Rate Sensing and Communications under FCC power restrictions

This article explores the viability of an application that can perform both, biomedical sensing and communications using the same transceiver operating at Ultra Wideband (UWB) range of frequencies. Among the numerous signals that can be measured employing UWB techniques, this work focuses on the heart rate (HR) and its variability over time (HRV). The approach exploits the fact that UWB radar sensing has long been proved possible especially for breath and HR. Founded on similar principles, UWB based communications showed great potential and some devices are already hitting the market. Still, there is no single application that can perform both tasks at the same time. A simple and approximate power budget is used to show the feasibility of sensing even under actual stringent FCC regulations and a standard communication device is chosen to show the potentialities of the combined strategy.