Cost-Effective FMCW Radar With Enhanced Tracking Coverage for Smart Healthcare Applications

The growing demand for intelligent and user-centric devices is accelerating the adoption of contactless sensing technologies in modern healthcare consumer electronics. In particular, indoor human tracking is vital for enabling health-aware applications such as fall detection, activity recognition, and behavior monitoring within smart homes and ambient assisted living environments. However, existing solutions based on wearables, cameras, or environmental sensors face limitations in user compliance, privacy, and spatial coverage. To address these challenges, this paper presents a cost-effective radar architecture optimized for supporting smart healthcare applications. The proposed radar integrates a dielectric grid layer (DGL)-enhanced wide-beamwidth series-fed patch antenna array with a 4-Tx/4-Rx 24 GHz CMOS radar IC on a compact, cost-effective coplanar multilayer PCB. This design enables a field-of-view (FoV) of over 160°. Experimental results demonstrate the system’s ability to perform real-time, multi-target mobility tracking with minimal blind zones, making it suitable for human-centric services requiring high performance spatial awareness.