Radar-Based Sleep Posture Transition Sensing: An Efficient Deep Learning Hierarchical Temporal Architecture Utilizing Depthwise Convolution
(IEEE Sensors Letter, Q1, IF: 2.4)


Sleep posture transitions (SPTs) are critical indicators of sleep quality, essential for preventing posture-related complications in clinical and assistive care. Conventional vision-based, infrared, and pressure-mat monitoring systems face limitations in privacy preservation and robustness. This letter presents a sensor-oriented radar signal processing method for SPT recognition using frequency-modulated continuous-wave (FMCW) radar, processing time-range (TR) maps through a hierarchical temporal architecture. The proposed single-branch network employs depthwise convolutions, multi-head self-attention, generalized mean pooling, and bidirectional recurrent modeling to extract discriminative features from radar-signal-derived TR representations. Evaluated on a seven-class SPT dataset with 1,407 TR samples from 20 participants, the method achieves 99.29% accuracy under five-fold cross-validation. A subject-independent leave-one subject-out evaluation further confirms strong generalization, with performance of 99.22% ± 1.78% across subjects. Robustness analysis under Gaussian noise perturbation maintains 98.94% accuracy, indicating resilience to signal degradation and environmental variations. Comparative analysis with time-Doppler (TD) maps with 1,400 samples achieves 95.71% accuracy, demonstrating the superiority of range-based displacement representations over velocity based signatures. The compact 18.6M parameter architecture with 2.10 GFLOPs and 5.787 ms inference time enables real-time deployment in privacy-preserving healthcare monitoring systems while maintaining sensor-level signal fidelity. . [Details...]