Jugular Venous Pulse Waveform Extraction From a Wearable Radio Frequency Sensor

Many prevalent heart diseases can be indicated by the features of the jugular venous pulse (JVP), an efficacious indicator of right heart health. However, JVP dynamics are not widely utilized in clinical settings, as its observation and sensing remain cumbersome. Noninvasive measures of cardiac behavior, including the JVP, are of growing interest to enable continuous and at-home monitoring of cardiac disorders. In this work, we propose a wearable near-field radio frequency (RF) sensor affixed with a neck collar on the clavicle over the internal jugular vein (IJV) to enable noninvasive JVP sensing. We employed a complex vector injection signal processing method to extract repeatable JVP waveform features in multiple postures. With a 21-subject human study, we demonstrated morphologically consistent JVP sensing with consistent a-, c-, and v-wave feature timings, benchmarked by synchronous electrocardiogram (ECG) and phonocardiogram (PCG). Furthermore, inter-postural experiments demonstrated the capability of the proposed system to quantify morphological changes to the JVP, which are present in many cardiac disorders. The results of this work suggest that the proposed near-field RF sensor is capable of noninvasive JVP monitoring, potentially enabling improved sensing in both clinical and ambulatory environments.