Chinese firm Calterah has produced a software-development kit (SDK) to help develop indoor mm-wave radar applications for smart homes, elderly care and smart offices.

Nowadays, mm-wave radar technology is rapidly gaining traction for indoor human detection applications. It is empowering many aspects of smart life due to features such as strong privacy protection, contactless sensing and precise detection capabilities, as well as its vital sign monitoring, human tracking and posture recognition.

To help use the Rhine mm-wave radar SoCs to expand the market of indoor mm-wave radar applications, the indoor human point cloud SDK uses the Rhine SDK architecture and integrates an indoor human detection module.

Thanks to the radar signal processing baseband integrated in Rhine SoCs and Calterah’s proprietary indoor radar signal processing algorithms, the indoor human detection module can yield rich and high-quality point clouds with powerful sensing. These point clouds feature strong cohesion for upper-level applications to differentiate human targets, as well as the ability to depict postures and body movements, facilitating upper-level applications to improve indoor radar functions, including fall detection and gesture recognition.

With the SDK, developers can use Rhine mm-wave radar SoCs to develop indoor radar products for diverse applications. For example, in hotels, the SDK can provide point cloud data to help developers use Rhine SoCs to enable human presence detection, people counting and human positioning. This technology can empower hotels to achieve precise energy conservation, intelligent management and intelligent security systems, delivering a smarter and more secure guest experience.

In offices, users can combine the human sensing capability of the SDK with other smart devices to enable functionalities such as intelligent lighting control, auto power-on-off and smart air direction control of air conditioning. Such intelligent systems can help achieve efficient energy management, assisting enterprises to save energy, reduce costs and carbon emissions, and improve efficiency.

For home- and community-based elderly care, using the point cloud data output by the SDK, mm-wave radar devices based on Rhine SoCs can provide real-time depiction of human postures and movements, enabling fall detection and helping ensure the health and safety of the elderly.

Established in 2014, Calterah Semiconductor (www.calterah.com) has grown into a global company designing and developing CMOS single-chip mm-wave radar sensors.