Unresolved challenges in robotic heart rate measurement for SAR

Identify and characterize the unresolved challenges in measuring human heart rate with robotic systems in post‑disaster search‑and‑rescue environments, and determine methods that achieve reliable accuracy under such conditions.

Background

The paper surveys vital-sign monitoring in search-and-rescue (SAR) and notes that, compared with temperature and respiratory rate, measuring heart rate and especially blood pressure with robots in post-disaster environments is much less mature. The authors introduce a soft-robotic gripper integrated on a quadruped to acquire pulse and blood pressure, and position their contribution against a backdrop of prior approaches such as visual PPG and radar whose accuracy is often limited in challenging conditions.

Within this context, they explicitly acknowledge that heart rate measurement remains problematic in SAR settings, motivating their system design and evaluation to help address these gaps.