On 16 December 2025, Sandro Gantner successfully defended his Master’s thesis in Biomedical Engineering. His thesis, “Robust Breathing Rate Estimation During Sleep From FMCW Radar in a Real-World Clinical Dataset,” focuses on contactless respiratory monitoring during sleep using FMCW radar in real-world home environments. The work was conducted within the Moonwalk study framework and addresses key challenges in non-contact breathing rate estimation, including motion artifacts, signal quality assessment, and real-world variability. Using overnight radar data from 179 nights across 19 participants, Sandro developed a robust signal processing pipeline including novel range-bin selection, a signal quality index (SQI), FFT-based breathing rate estimation, Kalman filtering, and out-of-bed detection. The system achieved strong performance in real-world clinical conditions, demonstrating the potential of FMCW radar for unobtrusive long-term respiratory monitoring.
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Lilian Witthauer, Prof. Dr. Lisa Margret Koch
We congratulate Sandro on his successful defense and his excellent contribution to contactless sleep and radar-based monitoring research within the samlab.
