Date of Award

12-2012

Degree Name

MS in Electrical Engineering

Department/Program

Electrical Engineering

Advisor

Tina Smilkstein

Abstract

Falls are a cause of concern for the elderly because it can make them unable to call for help. A monitoring system can detect automatically their immobility and provide help to the elderly if they fall. Ultra-wide band signals for a monitoring system is an excellent choice since it has low enough power to not interfere with other medical and household electronics as well as being able to transmit data to a central monitoring unit. One part of this monitoring system is a boundary detection system used to verify that the monitoring system is not capturing events outside the monitoring region such as an event outside the house or in a neighboring room.

The work presented in the paper, “A Frequency-Modulated Continuous Wave-Based Boundary Detection System for Determination of Monitoring Region for an Indoor Ultra-Wideband Short Range Radar-Based Eldercare Monitoring System” has determined that a frequency modulated continuous wave (FMCW) based system is an acceptable solution for boundary detection. A FMCW system can measure distance with less than 10cm accuracy if the chosen spectrum bandwidth is 1GHz or more. This thesis presents the design of a low cost approach to small PCB footprint distance detection circuitry for the boundary detection system.

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