Radar for the Wrist | Hacker News Reader

Radar for the Wrist

spectrum.ieee.org

37 pointsgodelmachine25 comments

Inching toward wearable millimeter-wave devices makes me pretty nervous about long term cancer effects. 5Ghz is pretty safe, but 140GHz? See https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18666810 for a study on the effects of .1 THz (100 GHz) effect on lymphocytes, but I don't see a followup, and this is from 2008... so I don't know if I should bed worried or not but it gives me pause.

You can pretty much find pubmed links to prove the world rests on a series of turtles.

Worry when some of these "studies" (scare quotes intentional) are actually replicated.

Unfair as the cited study seems pretty well designed. And they used only 0.03 mW per cm2, and the exposure time was on the order of only a few hours to a day.

Then it should be easy to replicate. Citation needed, as the Wikipedians like to say.

Yeah, but until we have those results, caution is warranted. That we should stop replicating studies was never implied.

Caution would be warranted if there were an underlying physical interaction or principle that suggests a mechanism of action. There's not. Non-ionizing radiation is non-ionizing. "Radiation-induced low-frequency collective vibrational modes" isn't a thing, except to the extent that it is the operating principle behind a tea kettle.

And in any event, the skin depth at these frequencies is measured in fractions of a millimeter. There are even microwave weapons that take advantage of that (Raytheon's ADS comes to mind).

Heating and ionization are not the only ways in which chemical reactions can be influenced. See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4340277/ for an overview (contains both positive and negative results).

Cool. All it takes is replication. The trial lawyers will beat a $100B path to your door once those pesky negative results are accounted for.

Oh, and in the meantime, I'd avoid hanging around near fireplaces and stay out of the sun, because "THz" is basically a synonym for "long-wave infrared."

> "THz" is basically a synonym for "long-wave infrared."

Yes, but this says nothing about whether the spectrum is smooth versus a spike, which could make a difference. Anyway, I think it can be a mistake to hide behind known mechanisms, while the empirical evidence shows that something else is going on.

I'll replicate it.

Fund it.

No problem, apparently. Talk to these folks:

https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/19/05/18/0227204/russias-a...

I mean the big question is how far do they penetrate the skin. I'd assume it isn't too far given the frequency.

Surface level skin cancer's no biggie?

Sounds like Google Soli.

https://atap.google.com/soli/

I’m waiting for the Amazon Echo breakthrough device that puts the technology in the hands of 100 million people.

Seems like a good fit for air typing.

https://www.slashgear.com/air-type-aims-to-let-you-type-with...

https://dilbert.com/strip/1994-10-12

> The new silicon radar can see through your clothes and has a range of up to 10 meters and a resolution of 15 millimeters. That combination lend it to another potential application, vital signs monitoring.

How about some adtech that detect when, ads really pique my attention...

Another component in the Total Skinner Box.

I want one in a tooth, imaging the motions of the most articulate part of the body – the tongue – so that I can give subvocal commands to my devices.

This tech exists. The navy seals use electronic bands around their necks to detect muscle movements, convert them to sounds and broadcast to the team.

is this related to bone-conduction microphones?

>Philips suggests it could be used to monitor the physical state of drivers to prevent accidents from medical emergencies or fatigue, among other scenarios.

I'm not sure why, but that makes me very uncomfortable. I honestly don't know why.

> > Philips suggests it could be used to monitor the physical state of drivers to prevent accidents from medical emergencies or fatigue, among other scenarios.

> I'm not sure why, but that makes me very uncomfortable. I honestly don't know why.

Because any initially existing privacy policies will be undermined gradually, or simply changed wholesale without notice, after enough data has been gathered, to allow that data to be sold to insurers and other "interested parties"?

Wouldn't it detect only things that it sees in the line of sight? So if you have one hand behind the other one, it won't see it?

Can't this be done using an accelerometer?

Also, is this tech different from how a Wacom tablet works?

Not really, you can't tell where all the fingers are from a wrist-mounted accelerometer. Wacom tablets are, I thought, capacitive touch?

This is a lot closer to a Magic Leap in terms of gesture recognition usage, although that's a different technology again - IR camera like a Kinect.

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