A Radar-Based Contactless System for Joint Phonocardiogram Reconstruction and Cardiac State Segmentation Using a Self-Attention 1D U-Net

Contactless vital signs monitoring is becoming increasingly relevant in scenarios where conventional sensors are impractical or not recommended. In this manuscript, a radar-based contactless system for the joint reconstruction of phonocardiogram (PCG) waveforms and cardiac state segmentation is illustrated. The proposed method exploits a self-attention one-dimensional (1D) U-Net fed by a pre-processed radar-derived input to estimate a PCG-like waveform, its envelope, and the four main cardiac phases: S1, systole, S2, and diastole. The accuracy of our method has been assessed on a public synchronized radar–PCG dataset acquired by means of a 24 GHz Doppler radar and a digital stethoscope. On the test subset, the proposed model achieved a 13.4885 dB reduction in log-spectral distance relative to the radar input signal, indicating a marked improvement in waveform fidelity. Segmentation performance also improved, with Micro-F1 increasing from 74.41% to 84.17% and Macro-F1 from 68.40% to 80.43% on average. Experimental results demonstrated the viability of real-time low-power embedded hardware deployment for contactless auscultation and continuous cardiac monitoring applications. The findings confirm that respiratory interference and low-amplitude signals complicate S2 detection, especially when exacerbated by subject motion.