Sensing people who are carrying nothing.

What it can sense

More than presence.

• Presence and occupancy — is anyone in this zone, including someone sitting completely still, which is where infrared occupancy sensors famously fail.
• People counting — how many, and roughly where, without identifying any of them.
• Motion and gait — direction, speed, and the difference between walking, sitting down, and falling.
• Fall detection — a fall has a distinctive signature in height and velocity that a radar can be trained to recognise, without depending on anyone having remembered a pendant.
• Micro-motion — chest movement from breathing is detectable at close range, which is how radar distinguishes a person from a coat over a chair.
• Gesture — small hand movements at short range, for controls that must work with gloves or wet hands.

Privacy

It cannot see a face, because it cannot form one.

This is not a policy commitment that could be reversed in a firmware update; it is a property of the sensor. What comes out is a handful of reflection points with range, angle and velocity. No image is formed at any stage, and nothing in the output resembles a person to a human eye.

We put that carefully, because the honest claim is strong enough without overstating it. Radar cannot identify someone the way a camera does. It is not a guarantee that a point cloud carries no personal information at all — gait, for instance, is a signature, and research continues in that direction. What we will say is that the sensor produces nothing that could be mistaken for footage, and that what it stores is a matter of design rather than of restraint.

That distinction is what makes radar deployable in places a camera cannot go: a ward bay, a bathroom, a changing area, a bedroom in assisted living. It is also, in our experience, the difference between a building-occupancy project that staff accept and one they quietly sabotage.

Where it fits

Use it when nobody should have to carry anything.

• Use mmWave when the subjects are people you cannot tag — patients, shoppers, visitors, residents, the public.
• Use mmWave when a camera would be unacceptable but the question is still about people.
• Use mmWave when conditions defeat optical sensing: darkness, dust, steam, glare.
• Use mmWave when you want to start small. One sensor over one room is a real pilot, installed in an afternoon, with no infrastructure commitment.
• Do not use mmWave when you need to know which person or which asset. It has no idea, and that is by design.
• Do not use mmWave when the space is crowded. Angular resolution decides how close two people can stand and still be counted as two; a sparse office is easy, a queue is not.
• Do not use mmWave when coverage has to follow a complicated floor plan. Cost scales with rooms rather than area, so a warren of small spaces gets expensive quickly.