Microwave radar sensors have been developed for non-contact monitoring of the health condition and location of targets, which will cause minimal discomfort and eliminate sanitation issues, especially in a pandemic situation. To this end, several radar sensor architectures and algorithms have been proposed to detect multiple targets at different locations. Traditionally, beamforming techniques incorporating phase shifters or mechanical rotors are utilized, which is relatively complex and costly. On the other hand, metamaterial (MTM) leaky wave antennas (LWAs) have a unique property of launching waves of different spectral components in different directions. This feature can be utilized to detect multiple targets at different locations to obtain their healthcare and location information accurately, without complex structure and high cost. To this end, this paper reviews the recent development of MTM LWA-based radar sensor architectures for vital sign detection and location tracking. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of MTM vital sign radar compared with different radar sensor architectures.
Keywords: leaky wave antenna (LWA); location tracking; metamaterial (MTM); radar sensor architecture; vital sign detection.