aiqbench analysis
This study provides a rigorous, apples-to-apples comparison of ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB, and Wi-Fi radar for non-intrusive health monitoring, isolating hardware variables to reveal distinct trade-offs between recognition accuracy and environmental robustness. By evaluating all systems with an identical convolutional neural network across diverse room layouts, the research clarifies how specific RF characteristics like range resolution and antenna diversity influence performance in real-world healthcare scenarios. These findings offer critical guidance for engineers designing next-generation contact-free sensing systems that must balance high-fidelity activity detection with deployment practicality.
A comparison between ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB and Wi-Fi radar for in-bedroom human activity monitoring and sleep interruption detection
arXiv:2608.20322v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Despite their growing importance for contact-free radio frequency (RF) based healthcare monitoring, different radio technologies such as frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB), and Wi-Fi sensing are rarely compared under identical deployment conditions, as existing studies typically differ in hardware, datasets, and evaluation methodologies. In addition, the performance of ceiling-mounted radars, despite their practical deployment and cost advantages in healthcare environments, remain underexplored. Therefore, this paper presents a controlled comparison and analysis of ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB, and Wi-Fi sensing using synchronized recordings from 20 participants across six room layouts. All technologies are evaluated with the same convolutional neural network (CNN) on both a fine-grained 10-class human activity recognition (HAR) task and a coarse 4-class sleep monitoring task. IR-UWB achieves the highest cross-subject activity recognition performance (89.0% macro F1), while FMCW generalizes best to unseen room layouts (83.8% macro F1). For sleep monitoring, all technologies exceed 92% macro F1 in unseen environments. The results reveal a fundamental trade-off between recognition performance and environmental robustness, which can be explained through differences in range resolution, antenna diversity, Doppler resolution, and spatial information retention. These findings provide practical guidelines for the design of healthcare-oriented RF sensing systems.
Abstract:Despite their growing importance for contact-free radio frequency (RF) based healthcare monitoring, different radio technologies such as frequency-modulated continuous wave (FMCW) radar, impulse radio ultra-wideband (IR-UWB), and Wi-Fi sensing are rarely compared under identical deployment conditions, as existing studies typically differ in hardware, datasets, and evaluation methodologies. In addition, the performance of ceiling-mounted radars, despite their practical deployment and cost advantages in healthcare environments, remain underexplored. Therefore, this paper presents a controlled comparison and analysis of ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB, and Wi-Fi sensing using synchronized recordings from 20 participants across six room layouts. All technologies are evaluated with the same convolutional neural network (CNN) on both a fine-grained 10-class human activity recognition (HAR) task and a coarse 4-class sleep monitoring task. IR-UWB achieves the highest cross-subject activity recognition performance (89.0% macro F1), while FMCW generalizes best to unseen room layouts (83.8% macro F1). For sleep monitoring, all technologies exceed 92% macro F1 in unseen environments. The results reveal a fundamental trade-off between recognition performance and environmental robustness, which can be explained through differences in range resolution, antenna diversity, Doppler resolution, and spatial information retention. These findings provide practical guidelines for the design of healthcare-oriented RF sensing systems.
Machine Learning (cs.LG)
arXiv:2608.20322 [cs.LG]
(or arXiv:2608.20322v1 [cs.LG] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.20322 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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