Can't help but think of the Star Trek TOS episode where Kirk is accused of murder and they find the "murder victim" in the ship by identifying and isolating heart beats until they discover he must still be aboard. It's been almost 60 years since the episode came out, but still sorry if that's a spoiler
No clunky wearables? No chest strap on the treadmill? Heart rate and respiration? Monitors everyone in the house simultaneously 24/7 on a cheap rpi? I hope this doesn't take years to come to market because this seems incredibly useful.
I have a superficial radial artery. You can take my pulse just by looking at the shadow on my wrist moving in the right lighting. Does this have "harmful effects" on my physiology?
As far as we know, it really doesn't, at least not at the energy levels used in practice. Blasting 2.4GHz at the same energy levels as a microwave oven would cook your flesh if you were sufficiently close to the emitter. But that doesn't happen.
Please don't post sneering comments like this on HN. The point itself may be valid, and raises a question worth discussing, but when it's phrased like this it crosses into shallow dismissal and flamebait territory, and is against the HN guidelines. We've had to ask you to observe the guidelines in just the past few months. You're a longtime community member and we value the positive contributions you've made over the years, but we need everyone to make the effort to use HN in the intended spirit.
I guess it is good to be aware of what’s possible. But all this stuff about using WiFi to measure things about people—it’s a bit creepy, right? I mean, to state the obvious, we (as a society) have got a bunch of poorly patched or corporate controlled WiFi routers attached to the network. What a surveillance catastrophe waiting to happen.
I mean, heart rate? Do we have a giant network that can tell where everybody is and whether they are having a strong emotional response to anything?
> With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent requirements for emerging sensing applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to meet advanced sensing requirements while minimizing the effect on communications. […]
> In recent years, Wi-Fi has been shown to be a viable technology to enable a wide range of sensing applications, and Wi-Fi sensing has become an active area of research and development. Due to the significant and growing interest in Wi-Fi sensing, Task Group IEEE 802.11bf was formed to develop an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that will enhance its ability to support Wi-Fi sensing and applications such as user presence detection, environment monitoring in smart buildings, and remote wellness monitoring. In this paper, we identify and describe the main definitions and features of the IEEE 802.11bf amendment as defined in its first draft. Our focus is on the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) sensing procedure, which supports bistatic and multistatic Wi-Fi sensing in license-exempt frequency bands below 7 GHz (specifically, 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz). We also present an overview of basic sensing principles, and provide a detailed discussion of features defined in the IEEE 802.11bf amendment that enhance client-based Wi-Fi sensing.
I do it using MMWave sensor, 60Ghz one. Want to have more of them but installation is a pain as these need to be mounted on ceiling so WiFi based sensor would be awesome!
I'm guessing with a polygraph: the obvious, cumbersome equipment is to make the subject uncomfortable and aware of the measuring, to make them more likely to break, or have a harder time controlling their body.
I think soon it will be time to seriously consider eliminating use of Wifi in some private places and going back to speed and reliability of copper wires. WiFi is like basically illuminating an area in light that can pass through walls.
If speed and reliability is needed, or desirable, you've already been doing this. My TV boxes have always been wired, because wifi is silly for (relatively) high bandwidth at fixed locations, given that wires in the wall have either been there or reasonable to add.
Some places, adding wires is expensive and given that wifi has improved over the years, it might not be worth the cost of adding wires.
Everyone’s heart is different. Like the iris or fingerprint, our unique cardiac signature can be used as a way to tell us apart. It can already be done from a distance using lasers [1].
fingerprints don't change, heartbeats do. Every heartbeat is different so it'd be difficult to even tell which heartbeat is yours for any giving signature.
This is nothing new. Wifi signals have been used to detect objects, people and animals, gait analysis[1], read keystrokes[2], monitor breathing and heart rates[3], "hear" conversations[4], etc for at least a decade now.
Indeed, this same principle has been shown to work with sound waves and not just RF waves. There was a paper a few years back that used car speakers and the microphone to be able to detect the number of people in the car for the purpose of detecting children or pets left in hot vehicles.
Have you gotten any of these to work? A few years ago I was tasked with investigating these kinds of techniques for a client (it was something cool and benign but I can’t say what due to NDA) and the big papers people are referring to when they mention this all had either huge asterisks or huge methodological flaws.
I wonder, if this would work with bluetooth, too. Would be nice to hack e.g. the new, cheaper version Pebble watch to measure heart-rate this way. I mean, possibly this could even be superimposed on the regular BT-connection signals. I presume open firmware would enable these sort of things.
It's galling that this press blurb only focuses on happy (supposed) health monitoring benefits, and fails to address the privacy concerns in the slightest.
This can be abused in so many ways, like watching how people's heart rates change then watching an add, or browsing a selection of goods in the shop, and making viscerally targeted advertising. Or burglars detecting whether people are at home.
Soon we won't just have to worry about unpatched wifi routers being parts of botnes, we'll have to worry about them tracking our locations and excitement levels and selling them off to whoever.
Hey, I heard about how utility pole inspecting helicopters are able to tell the good/rotten state of wooden telephone poles by the reverb pattern of sound waves coming off the poles from the rotors -- it seems to me the whole field of non-invasive sensing (and using existing/ambient emission sources) is getting pretty impressive.
Seeing that it works for a ESP32 chip I would say that its very likely to work on a smartphones's wifi chip though the article didn't say. Many people carry phones with them everywhere and all the time. You could build a very impressive profile of a person. It could be used to see when they get excited, scared, angry, etc at depending on what they view on the phone, the phone call they received, where they physically located on the earth, who they are around (by looking at identities of other phones near them) and properly other things as well I have not thought of.
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[ 4.8 ms ] story [ 76.7 ms ] threadhttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37469920 (from the same org)
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I mean, heart rate? Do we have a giant network that can tell where everybody is and whether they are having a strong emotional response to anything?
> With recent advancements, the wireless local area network (WLAN) or wireless fidelity (Wi-Fi) technology has been successfully utilized to realize sensing functionalities such as detection, localization, and recognition. However, the WLANs standards are developed mainly for the purpose of communication, and thus may not be able to meet the stringent requirements for emerging sensing applications. To resolve this issue, a new Task Group (TG), namely IEEE 802.11bf, has been established by the IEEE 802.11 working group, with the objective of creating a new amendment to the WLAN standard to meet advanced sensing requirements while minimizing the effect on communications. […]
* https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10547188
> In recent years, Wi-Fi has been shown to be a viable technology to enable a wide range of sensing applications, and Wi-Fi sensing has become an active area of research and development. Due to the significant and growing interest in Wi-Fi sensing, Task Group IEEE 802.11bf was formed to develop an amendment to the IEEE 802.11 standard that will enhance its ability to support Wi-Fi sensing and applications such as user presence detection, environment monitoring in smart buildings, and remote wellness monitoring. In this paper, we identify and describe the main definitions and features of the IEEE 802.11bf amendment as defined in its first draft. Our focus is on the Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) sensing procedure, which supports bistatic and multistatic Wi-Fi sensing in license-exempt frequency bands below 7 GHz (specifically, 2.4, 5, and 6 GHz). We also present an overview of basic sensing principles, and provide a detailed discussion of features defined in the IEEE 802.11bf amendment that enhance client-based Wi-Fi sensing.
* https://www.nist.gov/publications/ieee-80211bf-enabling-wide...
* https://www.cognitivesystems.com/how-does-802-11bf-enhance-l...
(See also perhaps IEEE 802.11bi, Enhanced Data Privacy.)
Some places, adding wires is expensive and given that wifi has improved over the years, it might not be worth the cost of adding wires.
[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2019/06/27/238884/the-penta...
https://doi.org/10.1109/GLOBECOM38437.2019.9014297 https://doi.org/10.1109/CCNC.2018.8319181 https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3286978.3287003 ..... many more.
I'd say this is far more interesting, does not use ML and credits the tech stacks that it leverages . https://people.csail.mit.edu/davidam/docs/WiMic_final.pdf
And we've been laughing all this time at tinfoil hat types..
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12353605
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/08/wi-fi...
https://archive.is/XnHUV
1: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/7457075
2: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2789168.2790109
3: https://archive.is/mFSDq
4: https://archive.is/sNVcM
This can be abused in so many ways, like watching how people's heart rates change then watching an add, or browsing a selection of goods in the shop, and making viscerally targeted advertising. Or burglars detecting whether people are at home.
Soon we won't just have to worry about unpatched wifi routers being parts of botnes, we'll have to worry about them tracking our locations and excitement levels and selling them off to whoever.
Wake me up when it can find me in the crowd.