Non-invasive and non-restrictive methods for measuring the physiological functions of the human body are useful for health care, security, and surveillance. In this paper, a new method that extracts human heartbeat information by utilizing ultra-wideband (UWB) impulse radar is proposed. The amplitude spectra of received radar pulses reflected from the human body are accumulated at specific time intervals, and chirp z-transform (CZT) is used to extract the heartbeat frequency from the amplitude spectra. The heartbeat frequency can be extracted with highfrequency resolution in the frequency band of the heartbeat of interest using CZT. Experimental results to verify the performance of the proposed method show that a highly accurate extraction of the heartbeat frequency is possible using this method.
