Sensing of Life Activities at the Human-Microwave Frontier

Modern microwave radar technologies and systems are taking important roles in healthcare, security, and human-machine interface by remote sensing of human life activities. This paper first reviews the developments in the past decade on the sensing front-end, transponder tag, and leveraging of other wireless infrastructure such as Wi-Fi. Based on the state-of-the-art engineering technologies, several emerging applications will then be studied, including continuous authentication, behavior recognition, human-aware localization, occupancy sensing, blood pressure monitoring, and sleep medicine. As radio frequency spectrum becomes a scarce resource, the allocation and spectrum sharing of life activity sensing bandwidth with other wireless infrastructures will be discussed. Several future research directions will be laid out to solve challenges for ubiquitous deployment of these sensing technologies at the human-microwave frontier.