Radar sensing for healthcare: Associate Editor Francesco Fioranelli on the applications of radar in monitoring vital signs and recognising human activity patterns

Although traditionally associated with defence and security domains, radar sensing has attracted significant interest in recent years in healthcare applications. These include the monitoring of vital signs such as respiration, heartbeat, and blood pressure, analysis of gait and mobility levels, classification of human activities to promptly detect critical events such as falls, as well as the evaluation of fitness and reactivity levels. The attractiveness of radar against alternative technologies such as wearable sensors or cameras lies in its contactless capabilities, whereby people do not need to wear, carry, or interact with any additional device, and plain images of people and private environments are not recorded. In this letter, we discuss some of the most recent achievements and outstanding research challenges related to radar applications in healthcare and present some results from our work at the University of Glasgow, including a dataset of radar signatures of human activities that are openly shared with the wider community