University of Calgary · Schulich School of Engineering · Waves Lab

VitalWaves

VitalWaves — Non-Contact Vital Signs Monitoring

Non-Contact Vital Signs Monitoring

Using mmWave radar to detect heart rate, breathing rate, and HRV — no wearables, no contact, no compromise.

1.59 bpm
Avg Breathing
Rate Error
4.96 bpm
Avg Heart
Rate Error
16.87 ms
Avg SDNN
Error

See It in Action

Watch VitalWaves extract heart rate, breathing rate, and HRV in real time — no physical contact required.

DSP Pipeline

From raw radar samples to physiological metrics in five stages.

01 / 05
📡
Data Acquisition
IWR1843 captures raw ADC data via DCA1000 at 6.5 M samples/s over 4 GHz bandwidth.
02 / 05
⚙️
Preprocessing
EWMA filtering, Bartlett beamforming, CFAR with phase variance, and DBSCAN localisation.
03 / 05
🫁
Chest Motion
Phase unwrapping converts slow-time signal into sub-millimetre chest displacement waveform.
04 / 05
〰️
VMD Decomposition
Variational Mode Decomposition separates cardiac and respiratory modes adaptively.
05 / 05
❤️
HR · BR · HRV
Beat detection, peak counting, and RMSSD/SDNN computation deliver final biometric outputs.

Photos

Hardware, live demos, results, and the team behind VitalWaves.

Capstone Poster

Full technical overview of the VitalWaves system — motivation, solution, methodology, results, and use cases.

VitalWaves_Poster.pdf Download PDF
VitalWaves_Poster.pdf

Full technical overview — methodology, results, and future work. Open in your browser or download for offline viewing.

The Team

Five engineers, one mission — making vital signs monitoring contact-free.

VitalWaves team group photo
Maged El Habiby
Maged El Habiby
Software & Mechatronics Engineer
Mazen El Habiby
Mazen El Habiby
Software & Mechatronics Engineer
Samir Sakr
Samir Sakr
Software Engineer & Business
Ben Zuidema
Ben Zuidema
Software Engineer
Marshal Kalynchuk
Marshal Kalynchuk
Software Engineer

Advisors & Sponsors

Dr. Hatem Abou-Zeid
Dr. Hatem Abou-Zeid
Sponsor · Waves Lab
Dr. Naser El-Sheimy
Dr. Naser El-Sheimy
Academic Advisor
Dr. Gholamreza Bakhshi
Dr. Gholamreza Bakhshi
Sponsor · Waves Lab
Simon Wu
Simon Wu
Teaching Assistant
"We are deeply grateful to our sponsor Waves Lab, our academic advisor and our teaching assistant, for their invaluable guidance, resources, and support throughout this project."

— The VitalWaves Team