ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensor architecture for contactless vital signs detection and monitoring at the industrial, scientific, medical (ISM) 60 GHz band. Such fast remote touchless monitoring is extremely important during pandemic seasons such as COVID-19. The architecture utilizes a leaky wave antenna to synthesize a reconfigurable radar beam whose direction is steered in the space without additional modulator circuits. The modulatorless architecture enables monitoring the vital signs of multiple patients at different locations by measuring the Doppler shifts from their movements. Furthermore, it also offers building power and cost effective sensor components by eliminating the modulator circuitry. The system considerations of the proposed architecture are discussed and the Doppler radar technique for vital signs detection is reviewed. A laboratory experiment of measuring the Doppler shift due to a vibrating target using a prototype of the proposed sensor is successfully conducted. The application of the proposed sensor can be extended to remotely scan and control running machines in industrial environments. © 2021 IEEE.
ABSTRACT
Most institutions and organizations nowadays have been taking responsibility in reducing their carbon footprint (CF) to curtail the global warming impact to at least 20–25% reduction by 2030. Universities and higher learning institutions are starting to invest in becoming greener and carbon-free. Current COVID19 communicable disease has swayed the routine and concurrently influenced regular trends of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions throughout the world. This study explored the possible GHG emissions (calculated as CO2e) from internal campus commute and purchased electricity consumption from the year 2018–2020 at Universiti Malaysia Perlis main campus to analyze the influence of COVID19 pandemic on its CO2e emission. The average amount of CO2e emitted during pre-COVID19 period (n = 26) was 1,518.8 tCO2e/year while during COVID19 period, it was 1,071.5 tCO2e/year (n = 10), marked as 29.5% reduction. Due to completeness and quality of data for contracted bus (monitoring period of years 2018, 2019 and 2020 as 12 months, 12 months, and 2 months, respectively), year 2019 was determined as the appropriate baseline year for setting the CO2e reduction target due to COVID19 pandemic precedented year. In comparison to pre-COVID19 pandemic, almost 95%/year and 7%/year reductions of CO2e were recorded for both Scope 1 and Scope 2, respectively. Comparing Scope 1 and 2, it was obviously observed that the purchased electricity consumption (Scope 2) was the predominant contributor to GHG emission at UniMAP campus by 78% despite of current pandemic influence and its reduction was indistinct (7%/year reduction). Thus, the reduction target in future should be venturing in energy savings and energy auditing in addition to carbon offsetting. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
ABSTRACT
This paper demonstrates a millimeter-wave (mmWave) radar sensor chip set for industrial, scientific, medical (ISM) and internet of things (IoT) applications. Thanks to their modular expandable wireless transceiver architecture, these radar chips offer implementing multimode radar sensors capable of deploying multiple radar techniques to detect object presence, range, velocity, vibrations and direction of arrival across multiple applications in conjunction with data communication capability for machine-to-machine (M2M) interaction. A 60GHz single-channel radar sensor prototype is implemented where the frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar technique is applied for object detection and range measurement in a multitarget scenario. A range resolution of 6cm and a ranging precision of 0.1mm at 1m range are experimentally verified. Another two-channel sensor prototype is implemented where multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) radar technique is applied for direction-of-arrival (DoA) estimation. An experiment of measuring vibration rates from multiple targets at different locations using Doppler radar technique is successfully conducted. This experiment simulates a remote control environment of running machines in factories. Furthermore, an experiment of monitoring a human heartbeat rate remotely by the sensor is performed where a 78bpm rate is measured. Such contactless measurement is extremely important to prevent disease spreading during pandemic seasons such as COVID-19.