Portable coherent frequency-modulated continuous-wave radar for indoor human tracking

Radar-based human tracking can be applied to indoor healthcare scenarios, such as fall detection of elderly people. In this work, a portable frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar prototype for indoor human tracking is presented. The system provides absolute-range detection capabilities. Furthermore, it uses a novel approach - not requiring the sharing of the generation and acquisition clocks - to possess the highly-desired coherence feature, which enables the preservation of the phase history of targets. As a result, videos of inverse synthetic aperture radar (ISAR) images - i.e., videos of range-Doppler frames - can be reconstructed. Experimental results for a walking person in a highly-cluttered indoor environment confirm the suitability of the low-cost radar prototype for indoor healthcare applications.