A method for determining a rate of repetitive bodily motion of an individual with negligible contact with the individual begins by one or more computing devices transmitting a signal for reflection off of the individual and receiving a reflected signal. The method continues with one or more computing device applying a frequency estimation algorithm to the baseband signal to produce an estimated spectral density, where the estimated spectral density is in frequency domain and includes at least one frequency component corresponding to the repetitive bodily motion. The method further includes applying a repetitive bodily motion pattern search function to the estimated spectral density to estimate the rate of the repetitive bodily motion of the individual based on the at least one frequency component.
