A comparison between ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB and Wi-Fi radar for in-bedroom human activity monitoring and sleep interruption detection

A controlled comparison of ceiling-mounted FMCW, IR-UWB, and Wi-Fi radar for in-bedroom human activity monitoring found that IR-UWB achieved the highest cross-subject activity recognition performance (89.0% macro F1), while FMCW generalized best to unseen room layouts (83.8% macro F1), according to a study posted on arXiv (2608.20322v1). All technologies exceeded 92% macro F1 for sleep monitoring in unseen environments, revealing a trade-off between recognition performance and environmental robustness.

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.