Enabling Low-Cost Ultra-High-Framerate WiFi-Networked UWB Radar Systems for Indoor Monitoring of Physiology and Activity

Achieving long-term, unobtrusive monitoring for vulnerable or unwell individuals remains a critical challenge in healthcare. This paper presents a novel networked sensing system based on System-on-Chip (SoC) Ultra-Wideband (UWB) radar technology, designed to enhance monitoring functionality and robustness. With its high capture rate, this system uniquely enables Doppler data extraction from UWB radar data, providing detailed micro-Doppler velocity insights that were previously impractical to capture over a network. To manage the large data volumes associated with ultra-high-speed UWB radar data capture, an efficient compression scheme using statistical binning and Huffman encoding was developed, achieving <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\sim 80 \%$</tex> compression. Operating over a local WiFi network, the system links multiple radar nodes to a central Supervisor, implemented as an HTTP REST server using FastAPI, which streamlines data storage in a PostgreSQL database. Extensive lab tests validate the ability of the system to capture high-quality data, and simulated real-world testing confirms its reliability and ease of deployment. This innovation opens new possibilities for unobtrusive healthcare monitoring in applications such as location tracking, fall detection, and gait analysis, paving the way for future advancements in remote monitoring.