Radar Doppler technique to estimate the energy expenditure of human physical activities

The estimation of activity-related energy expenditure during a day is an important parameter to be calculated and monitored, especially in Ambient Assisted Living application for elders. In fact, scientific evidences exist that a sedentary life has serious physiological and heart implications. Many are the compact and wearable measuring devices currently available, such as pedometers and accelerometers. Anyway, in the view of Ambient Assisted Living application, contactless and no-collaborative systems are to be preferred. For this reason, in this paper an alternative approach for activity-related energy expenditure calculation based on an electromagnetic contactless motion sensor is proposed. The velocity and kinetic energy associated to a moving target are calculated from the elaboration of spectrogram intensity. The method has been firstly validated with a well-known movement, i.e. the swinging of a physical pendulum, and then tested with a human subject moving his arm, with very promising results. © Institution of Engineering and Technology.