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, receiving a reflected signal, and down-converting the reflected signal to a baseband 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, and 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.