You are on page 1of 11

928

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Wireless Sensing of Human Respiratory Parameters


by Low-Power Ultrawideband Impulse Radio Radar
Joshua Chong Yue Lai, Ying Xu, Erry Gunawan, Member, IEEE, Eric Chern-Pin Chua, Arash Maskooki,
Yong Liang Guan, Kay-Soon Low, Senior Member, IEEE, Cheong Boon Soh, Senior Member, IEEE, and
Chueh-Loo Poh, Member, IEEE

AbstractThe simultaneous tracking of the chest respiratory


rate and amplitude of human beings using a low-power ultrawideband (UWB) impulse radio signal is investigated for the
application of sleep apnea monitoring. The measurement of respiratory amplitude, in addition to the breathing rate, is crucial
for sleep apnea assessment which requires, among other things,
the accurate estimation of tidal volume per minute. Backscattered
UWB impulse radio signals from a human subject are detected
in the time domain to calculate the chest displacements in this
paper. Since the pulse disposition in time is linearly related to
the chest movement, the amplitude of the chest movement can be
extracted accurately without calculation approximations normally
used in many of the existing methods. The multipeak detection
of the pulse disposition method, instead of using only the single
pulse peak detection, is also proposed to improve the accuracy of
the calculation further. The experiments are carried out on four
human subjects with different sizes and genders. The correlation
of the chest movements amplitude and breathing rate between the
simultaneously measured results obtained by our method and by
the respiratory chest band is very good.
Index TermsImpulse radio radar, respiratory parameters,
sleep apnea, ultrawideband (UWB), wireless sensor.

I. I NTRODUCTION

LTRAWIDEBAND (UWB) radio engineering has long


been investigated for the noncontact detection of respiration [1][3]. One important application of the noncontact
wideband radio sensor is in the assessment of obstructive sleep
apnea syndrome (OSAS), which is a breathing disorder characterized by the repetitive obstructions of the upper airway which
lead to complete or partial airflow cessation. Polysomnography
is the current standard diagnostic modality of OSAS, but it
is relatively inconvenient, expensive, and inefficient [4]. The
noncontact wideband radio sensor therefore presents a significant advance, as it significantly redefines the notion of nonintrusiveness and patient-friendliness for home-based usage. It
is not affected by clothes or blankets and is also safe to the
Manuscript received January 18, 2010; revised April 30, 2010; accepted
June 30, 2010. Date of publication November 9, 2010; date of current version
February 9, 2011. The Associate Editor coordinating the review process for this
paper was Dr. Devendra Misra.
J. C. Y. Lai, E. Gunawan, A. Maskooki, Y. L. Guan, K.-S. Low, C. B.
Soh, and C.-L. Poh are with the Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
639798.
Y. Xu is with TDK-EPC, Singapore 349249.
E. C.-P. Chua is with the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore
169547.
Color versions of one or more of the figures in this paper are available online
at http://ieeexplore.ieee.org.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TIM.2010.2064370

environment, including the human body, due to the very low


electromagnetic energy emission.
Current research on noncontact respiration movement detection focuses on a Doppler radar technique based on carrier
phase detection or changes in the wavelength when radio waves
reflect off the moving chest wall [5][7]. However, the key
disadvantage of this technique is the inaccurate measurements
of the respiratory amplitude. This is due to an inherent approximation in a key processing step and to its sensitivity to ambient
conditions, which necessitates constant recalibration.
The development of the carrierless UWB impulse radio
(UWB-IR) systems has provided new means for the noncontact
measurement of the human respiration [8]. In this method, a
train of subnanosecond pulses is transmitted toward a subject,
a vector network analyser is used as the receiver to measure
the frequency response of the received backscattered signal,
and, then, an inverse fast Fourier transform is taken to derive
the power delay profile of the signal in the time domain.
This paper shows the feasibility of measuring the respiratory
rate accurately. However, the frequency domain measurement
method does not give a direct measurement of the chest movement amplitude, and the inherent approximation used in taking
the inverse Fourier transform to derive the signal in the time
domain will lower the accuracy of the respiratory amplitude
measurement.
The measurement of the respiratory amplitude is crucial for
the OSAS assessment which requires, among other things, the
accurate estimation of the tidal volume per minute. In this
paper, we propose an accurate and straightforward method
to detect both the respiratory amplitude and rate using the
carrierless UWB-IR system which complies with the Federal
Communications Commission (FCC) regulation on electromagnetic emission [9]. Instead of measuring the frequency
response of the received backscattered signal, the proposed
method measures the pulse disposition in the time domain
which is linearly related to the chest movement, and hence,
the absolute amplitude of the chest movement can be extracted accurately. The multipeak detection of the pulse disposition, instead of using only the single pulse peak detection,
is also proposed to improve the accuracy of the calculation
further. Several different scenarios, i.e., with the subject in
sitting and sleeping positions, are investigated. The measurement results obtained using our proposed method are then
compared with the simultaneous measurement results obtained
using a respiratory band which measures the chest movements
directly.

0018-9456/$26.00 2010 IEEE

LAI et al.: WIRELESS SENSING OF HUMAN RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS BY LOW-POWER UWB-IR RADAR

Fig. 1.

System block diagram.

Fig. 2.

UWB pulse in time and frequency domain.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. In


Section II, the proposed scheme and method of measurement
are discussed. The results of the measurements are presented in
Section III, and finally, Section IV concludes this paper.
II. M ETHODS
A UWB microwave carrierless impulse radar is used to radiate pulses toward a human subject and receive the backscattered
signals. Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of this system. The
UWB pulses are generated using the Picosecond Pulse Labs
3500D impulse generator, which produces Gaussian pulses
with a full width at half maximum of 80 ps. An Agilent
DSO81204B real-time wideband digital oscilloscope with a
sampling rate of 40 GHz is used for recording the backscattered
signals from a human chest. The high sampling rate (40 GHz)
is needed to record the UWB impulse of very short (80 ps)
duration.
Thales UWB antennas [10] are used as the transmitter and
receiver of the UWB signals. The antennas dimension is
3-cm width by 4-cm height. The antennas gain is 11 dB with an
azimuth beamwidth of 60 and an elevation beamwidth of 40 .
The antennas return loss measured with an Agilent N5230A
vector network analyzer is lower than 10 dB from 2.4 to
12 GHz. The transmitted UWB pulse is compliant with the FCC
regulation on electromagnetic emission [9]. Fig. 2 depicts the
pulse in the time and frequency domains after passing through
the antenna.
The transmitting and receiving antennas are placed stationary
side by side as shown in Fig. 1. As the beam is focused on

929

the subjects chest, the main peak in the backscattered signal


would belong to the pulse reflected from the chest. The basic
idea of detecting the human chest motion is by detecting the
time shift of the peak of the backscattered UWB signals in
subsequent oscilloscope signal acquisition which is directly
proportional to the displacement of the chest and hence reveals
the chest movement function. The acquisition rate of the system
oscilloscope in the experiment is 5 Hz, which means that the
oscilloscope records five frames of the received UWB signals
in a second. The acquisition rate of 5 Hz is sufficient to capture
the respiratory motion in a 0.130.33-Hz range. The frameby-frame signal acquisition by the oscilloscope is shown in
Fig. 3(a).
To obtain the chest movement amplitude graph d, the
displacement of the backscattered signals peak in time in
subsequent oscilloscope acquisition t is multiplied by the
speed of the propagation of the pulse in free space divided by
two. The division by two is due to the two-way travel time of
the wave to the chest and back to the receiver
d =

ct
2

where c is the speed of the propagation of the pulse in free space


and t is the displacement of the peak in time. The accuracy of
the detected chest motion amplitude is related to the time shift
of the peak of the UWB signal, and thus, the high sampling rate
(40 GHz) of the oscilloscope is important so that the signal peak
can be reconstructed from the samples accurately. The chest
movement amplitude graph is shown in Fig. 3(b).

930

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Fig. 3. Signal processing block diagram showing the steps to obtain the chest movement function and respiratory rate from the recorded UWB signals.
(a) Frame-by-frame acquisition. (b) Chest movement graph. (c) Chest movement frequency power spectrum.

Finally, the Fourier transform is applied on the chest


movement (respiratory amplitude) function to obtain the frequency power spectrum for estimating the respiratory rate. The
frequency spectrum of the chest movement function is shown
in Fig. 3(c).
The UWB signals captured by the digital oscilloscope are
transferred to the PC using LABVIEW and the signal process-

ing, described earlier, is done offline using a program written in


MATLAB.
To determine the chest movement amplitude detection accuracy, the UWB impulse radar is tested using a mechanical chest
phantom. The chest phantom is a plastic container of water as
shown in Fig. 4(a). The phantom is driven by a lead screw and
a motor system with a linear resolution of 20 m. To determine

LAI et al.: WIRELESS SENSING OF HUMAN RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS BY LOW-POWER UWB-IR RADAR

Fig. 4.

931

Experiment setup. (a) With mechanical chest phantom. (b) With human subject.
TABLE I
WEIGHTS AND HEIGHTS OF THE SUBJECTS UNDER TEST

the smallest detectable motion by the UWB sensor, the chest


phantom is programmed to move in a triangular waveform of
different amplitudes.
For the human respiratory measurement, the experiment is
repeated using four human subjects taking the measurement in
turn in sitting position as shown in Fig. 4(b). The profiles of
the subjects under test are given in Table I. The measurements
are taken at four different distances between the sensor and the
human subject, i.e., 0.5, 1.0, 1.5, and 2.0 m. Each measurement
is taken for a duration of 1 min. The subject is asked to relax
such that the spontaneous respiration is measured.
In order to verify the measured respiratory rate and amplitude from the UWB waveforms, simultaneous measurements
are taken with a respiratory band (inductive plethysmography)
wrapped around the subjects chest as the reference. The respiratory band has a variable inductance which changes proportionally to the subjects chest perimeter. A precision LCR
meter is used to measure these changes as the chest movement
function, and a PC is used to store the measurement data
collected. The respiratory band can measure the respiration
precisely.
To evaluate the UWB sensor capability in a more realistic
scenario, an experiment is conducted with Subject 5 in a
sleeping state. The profile of Subject 5 is given in Table I.
The experiment is conducted for a duration of 4 h with the
same setup as in Fig. 1 except that the subject is sleeping on
a mattress placed on the floor, with the antennas at 0.8 m on
top of the subject. A video recording is made for the whole
measurement process.

III. R ESULTS
Fig. 5(a) and (b) shows the results of the chest phantom
movements detected with the UWB sensor. Fig. 5(a) shows that
very small movements of about +/ 0.05 mm in amplitude
are detected, even when the phantom is stationary, which is due
to the presence of the system noise. Fig. 5(b) shows that the
detected relative phantom movements peak-to-peak amplitude
is within 0.40.6 mm (or 0.5 +/ 0.05 mm) when the actual
phantom movement is 0.5 mm. This shows that the system
is able to detect the relative movement amplitude accurately
within a +/ 0.05-mm tolerance.
The human chest movements amplitudes measured from the
backscattered UWB signals and from the respiratory band are
shown in Figs. 69. The results are for four human subjects at
distances of 0.5, 1, 1.5, and 2 m, respectively. The results from
the UWB signal are indicated by the legend UWB, and the
results from the respiratory band are indicated by the legend
Band in these figures.
The correlation coefficients between the measurement results
of the UWB signal and the respiratory band for each subject at
different distances are summarized in Table II. It shows that the
respiratory waveforms obtained with the UWB method are well
correlated with the respiratory band waveforms for larger sized
human subjects even at a relatively long distance, as indicated
by the results for Subjects 1 and 2. Whereas for the smaller
sized subjects, i.e., Subjects 3 and 4, the respiratory patterns
are well correlated for the measurement at near distances.
To improve the measurement results of the UWB scheme
when the subject is far from the sensor, we propose a

932

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Fig. 5. (a) Detected noise when chest phantom is motionless (b). Detected motion when chest phantom movement is set to 0.5 mm.

Fig. 6. Chest movement function for the four human subjects in sitting position at a 0.5-m distance from the sensor. (a) Subject 1. (b) Subject 2. (c) Subject 3.
(d) Subject 4.

multipeak detection method. It has been shown in Fig. 3


that the movement amplitude of the chest could be obtained
from the displacement of the peak in time of the UWB pulse

received. However, the chest movement information is not


only carried by the peak of the signal but also by the other
subpeaks of the signal pulse. Fig. 10 shows that the received

LAI et al.: WIRELESS SENSING OF HUMAN RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS BY LOW-POWER UWB-IR RADAR

933

Fig. 7. Chest movement function for the four human subjects in sitting position at a 1-m distance from the sensor. (a) Subject 1. (b) Subject 2. (c) Subject 3.
(d) Subject 4.

Fig. 8. Chest movement function for the four human subjects in sitting position at a 1.5-m distance from the sensor. (a) Subject 1. (b) Subject 2. (c) Subject 3.
(d) Subject 4.

934

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Fig. 9. Chest movement function for the four human subjects in sitting position at a 2-m distance from the sensor. (a) Subject 1. (b) Subject 2. (c) Subject 3.
(d) Subject 4.
TABLE II
CORRELATION COEFFICIENTS BETWEEN RESPIRATORY WAVEFORMS
OBTAINED WITH UWB METHOD AND WITH RESPIRATORY BAND

Fig. 11. Correlation coefficients between respiratory waveforms obtained


with multipeak detection method and with respiratory band.

Fig. 10. Peak and subpeaks of the UWB backscattered signal.

signal pulse consists of multiple peaks: a peak and several


subpeaks.
In the multipeak detection method, the displacements of the
peak and subpeaks are traced and recorded. After finding the
time shifts (t1 , t2 , etc., in Fig. 10) of all the peak and
subpeaks separately, the results are averaged. The method could
effectively reduce the effect of noise and enhance the signalto-noise ratio. Up to three peak/subpeaks are used for the

LAI et al.: WIRELESS SENSING OF HUMAN RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS BY LOW-POWER UWB-IR RADAR

935

Fig. 12. Spectrum of the respiration waveforms when the four human subjects in sitting position are at a 0.5-m distance from the sensor. (a) Subject 1. (b) Subject
2. (c) Subject 3. (d) Subject 4.
TABLE III
BREATHING RATES (BPM) OBTAINED WITH RESPIRATORY BAND AND WITH UWB METHOD

detection in our computation. Fig. 11 presents the correlation


coefficients between the results using single-, two-, and threepeak detections and the respiratory band when the subjects are
2 m away from the UWB sensor, respectively. The figure shows
that increasing the number of peaks used to obtain the chest

movement amplitude greatly improves the accuracy of the results, particularly for Subject 4. More than 100% improvement
in the correlation coefficients is achieved for Subject 4.
To get the respiratory rates of the subjects, the chest
movement functions are transformed from the time domain

936

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Fig. 13. Correlation coefficients between respiratory waveforms obtained with UWB sensor and with respiratory band for 60 min of recording.

Fig. 14. Respiratory waveforms where the subject temporarily stopped breathing for about 40 s.

to the frequency domain using the Fourier transform as in


the single-peak method. The Fourier transform graphs are
shown in Fig. 12. The reference breathing rates, in breaths per
minute (BPM), obtained from the respiratory band are given in
Table III. The breathing rates obtained with the UWB
method are calculated and compared with the results derived
from the respiratory band. The results are also tabulated in
Table III. They are in perfect agreement for the cases when
the correlation coefficients are higher than 0.5. Some frequency
components near the breathing rates are also noticed in Fig. 12.
This may be due to the movements of the clothing that the
subjects under the experiments are wearing. The subjects with
tighter clothing, for example, Subject 2, have less spurious
frequency components than the subjects with loose clothing
(Subject 3).
An overnight sleeping measurement is carried out to verify the long-time-recording accuracy. In the experiment, the
subject under test is lying in a supine position with a blanket
covering and is video recorded to monitor his position. The
correlation coefficients between the waveforms obtained with
the UWB sensors and the respiratory band are shown in Fig. 13.
The averaged correlation coefficient for the 60-min recording
is 0.64.
There are instances where the subject stopped breathing
unconsciously during his/her sleep. An instance is shown in
Fig. 14, where the respiratory waveforms show that the sub-

ject temporarily stopped breathing for about 40 s. The stopbreathing event is successfully detected by both the UWB
sensor and the respiratory band.
During his/her sleep, the subject might turn and sleep on
his side sometimes. These instances are recorded as shown in
Fig. 15. It is clearly seen from the figure that the respiratory
band is still able to measure the breathing, whereas the UWB
sensor is unable to detect the chest movement. This is due to
the inappropriate illumination of the patients body by the fixed
antenna, that is, the signal backscattering is mostly from the
side of the body and not on the chest. To solve this problem,
multiple sensors can be placed at multiple desired locations to
ensure that the backscattered signal could be detected by at least
one sensor.
IV. C ONCLUSION
In this paper, the UWB microwave carrierless impulse radar
has been investigated for the simultaneous tracking of the
human respiratory rate and amplitude with both the mechanical
chest phantom and human subject measurements. The results of
this paper show that the UWB microwave impulse could be employed to detect both the human respiration rate and amplitude
accurately. By using the multipeak detection method, the results
are improved significantly, particularly for a measurement at
a longer distance. The correlation coefficients of 0.500.83

LAI et al.: WIRELESS SENSING OF HUMAN RESPIRATORY PARAMETERS BY LOW-POWER UWB-IR RADAR

937

Fig. 15. Respiratory waveforms obtained when the subject turned to sleep on his side.

between the UWB and respiratory band measurements can be


achieved for measurements at a 2-m distance.
The transmitted power in this experiment is well below the
FCC regulation for UWB in medical application. By exploiting
the full capacity of the allowed power in the FCC regulations,
the measurement distance can be extended accordingly. For
the sleeping measurement, the UWB impulse radar system
presented in this paper is further shown to be robust for a longtime measurement. In the future, multiple UWB transceivers
can be implemented with a time multiplexing method to provide
full sensing coverage whenever the subject changes sleeping
position.
This paper shows that the UWB method of detecting the
human respiration has the potential to provide sleep physicians with an alternative tool to in-hospital assessment that
is reliable and extremely user-friendly. The major benefits
of the method include the noncontact UWB sensor which is
significantly more user-friendly and practical than the other
existing approaches for use in a home environment. In the
future, the noncontact UWB sensor could be incorporated
into routine clinical practice, whereby, for suitable patients,
the sleep physicians can order a home-based assessment using the noncontact UWB sensor instead of the in-hospital
assessment.

[7] I. Immoreev and S. Ivashov, Remote monitoring of human cardiorespiratory system parameters by radar and its applications, in Proc. Ultrawideband Ultrashort Impulse Signals, Sep. 1519, 2008, pp. 3438.
[8] K. Higashikaturagi, Y. Nakahata, I. Matsunami, and A. Kajiwara, Noninvasive respiration monitoring sensor using UWB-IR, in Proc. IEEE
ICUWB, Sep. 1012, 2008, vol. 1, pp. 101104.
[9] FCC (GPO) Title 47, Section 15 of the Code of Federal Regulations
SubPart F: Ultra-wideband, Aug. 2003.
[10] L. W. Chua, A new UWB antenna with excellent time domain characteristics, in Proc. Eur. Conf. Wireless Technol., Oct. 2005, pp. 531534.

Joshua Chong Yue Lai received the B.Eng. degree


in biomedical engineering from the University of
Malaya, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, in 2006, and the
M.Eng. degree in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore, in 2009.
He is currently a Research Associate with the Robotic Research Center, NTU. His research interests
include ultrawideband imaging, biomedical sensors,
robotics, and instrumentation.

Ying Xu received the B.Eng. and M.S. degrees from


Southeast University, Nanjing, China, in 1999 and
2003, respectively. She received the Ph.D. degree
from Nanyang Technological University, Singapore,
in 2010.
She is currently a Design Engineer with
TDK-EPC, Singapore. Her work involves duplexer
designs, surface-acoustic-wave filters, and package
designs. Her research interests include planar
microwave circuits, periodic structures, electronic
packages, and various planar and waveguide

R EFERENCES
[1] J. C. Lin, Noninvasive microwave measurement of respiration, Proc.
IEEE, vol. 63, no. 10, p. 1530, Oct. 1975.
[2] B. Lohman, O. Boric-Lubecke, V. M. Lubecke, P. W. Ong, and
M. M. Sondhi, A digital signal processor for Doppler radar sensing of
vital signs, IEEE Eng. Med. Biol. Mag., vol. 21, no. 5, pp. 161164,
Sep./Oct. 2002.
[3] N. A. Collop, W. M. Anderson, B. Boehlecke, D. Claman, R. Goldberg,
D. J. Gottlieb, D. Hudgel, M. Sateia, and R. Schwab, Portable monitoring task force of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine, Clinical
guidelines for the use of unattended portable monitors in the diagnosis
of obstructive sleep apnea in adult patients, J Clin. Sleep Med., vol. 3,
no. 7, pp. 737747, Dec. 2007.
[4] N. A. Collop, Portable monitoring for the diagnosis of obstructive sleep
apnea, Curr. Opin. Pulm. Med., vol. 14, no. 6, pp. 525529, Nov. 2008.
[5] D. R. Morgan and M. G. Zierdt, Novel signal processing techniques for
Doppler radar cardiopulmonary sensing, Signal Process., vol. 89, no. 1,
pp. 4566, Jan. 2009.
[6] I. Immoreev and T. H. Tao, UWB radar for patient monitoring, IEEE
Aerosp. Electron. Syst. Mag., vol. 23, no. 11, pp. 1118, Nov. 2008.

antennas.

Erry Gunawan (M90) received the B.Sc. degree


in electrical and electronic engineering from the
University of Leeds, Leeds, U.K., in 1983, and the
MBA and Ph.D. degrees from Bradford University,
Bradford, U.K., in 1984 and 1988, respectively.
Since 1989, he has been with the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where he
currently is an Associate Professor. He has published more than 70 papers in international journals
and more than 60 international conference papers
on error correction coding, modeling of cellular communications systems,
power control for code-division-multiple-access cellular systems, mediumaccess control protocols, multicarrier modulations, multiuser detections, spacetime coding, power-line communications, and radiolocation systems.

938

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON INSTRUMENTATION AND MEASUREMENT, VOL. 60, NO. 3, MARCH 2011

Eric Chern-Pin Chua received the B.Eng.


degree in electrical and electronic engineering
from Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in
biomedical engineering from University College
Dublin, Dublin, Ireland, in 2008.
He is currently a Research Fellow in the Neuroscience and Behavioural Disorders Program with
the Duke-NUS Graduate Medical School, Singapore.
His main research interests include biomedical signal
processing, with particular application to sleep and
sleepiness monitoring.
Dr. Chua was a member of the IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology
Society and is a member of the Society for Research on Biological Rhythms
and the Society for Neuroscience, Singapore Chapter.

Arash Maskooki received the B.S. degree from the


Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran, in
2005, and the M.Eng. degree from Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, in 2008.
He is currently working toward the Ph.D. degree, with a thesis on ultrawideband sensing systems, in the School of Electrical and Electronic
Engineering, NTU.
His research interests include signal processing
and communication systems. His research work is
currently focused on wireless sensor networks, particularly body area networks.

Yong Liang Guan received the Ph.D. degree from


The Imperial College of Science, Technology and
Medicine (University of London), London, U.K.,
in 1997, and the B.Eng. degree (first class honors) from the National University of Singapore,
Singapore, in 1991.
In 19911994, he was an Engineer with the
Singapore Telecom and Singapore Technologies, respectively. He is currently an Associate Professor
with the Division of Communication Engineering,
School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering,
Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore. He is also the Director of
the Positioning and Wireless Technology Center, NTU. His research interests
include modulation and the coding and signal processing for communication
systems and information security systems.

Kay-Soon Low (M88SM00) received the B.Eng.


degree in electrical engineering from the National
University of Singapore, Singapore, and the Ph.D.
degree in electrical engineering from the University
of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia.
Since 1994, he has been a Lecturer with the School
of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang
Technological University (NTU), Singapore, where
he subsequently became an Associate Professor. Currently, he is the Center Director of the Satellite Engineering Centre, NTU. He has served as a consultant
to many companies and has a number of granted patents on nonlinear circuits
and ultrawideband systems. His funded projects are in the field of wireless
sensor network, motion control system, pulse neural network, and satellite
system.

Cheong Boon Soh (M84SM03) received the B.E.


degree (Hons I) in electrical and computer systems
engineering and the Ph.D. degree from Monash University, Melbourne, Australia, in 1983 and 1987,
respectively.
He is currently an Associate Professor with
the School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore. He has published mroe than 110 international journal papers. His current research interests
include ultrawideband for medical applications, auscultation, and stroke assessment, E-medicine, robust control, system theory,
nonlinear systems, coding theory, networking, mobile communication systems,
and intelligent systems.

Chueh-Loo Poh (M07) was born in Singapore


in 1976. He received the B.Eng. degree (first
class honors) in electrical and electronic engineering from Nanyang Technological University (NTU),
Singapore, in 2001, and the Ph.D. degree in bioengineering from Imperial College London, London,
U.K., in 2007.
Since 2007, he has been an Assistant Professor with the Division of Bioengineering, School of
Chemical and Biomedical Engineering, NTU. He is
also currently a Visiting Research Fellow at Imperial
College London. His current research interests include medical image processing and visualization.

You might also like