Could wireless replace wearables? | Hacker News Reader

Could wireless replace wearables?

newsoffice.mit.edu

59 pointsmsolujic20 comments

So someone could make that motion tracker thing out of Alien, which works through walls, just using wifi and an LCD screen?

I want one. Where's the app?

Actually, reading the original paper, it needs quite a bulky antenna array, looking like a TV aerial (photo on page 3: http://18.7.29.232/bitstream/handle/1721.1/86299/MIT-CSAIL-T...)

I still want one.

Similar, a camera can also be sufficient to measure heart rate: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SA5QVm8M9PE

The method is actually quite interesting. By exaggerating slight changes in color you can actually visually see someone's pulse (and other small changes in the environment.)

Yep, the main difference is that wireless also works through walls, through a bed cover, if the person is facing away from the device, etc.

I wonder if this technology will eventually become good enough to measure the heart rate of lying politicians from just video records. Bill Clinton would make an excellent example. Makeup might fool it though.

You don't need to name a politician to imply lying. Naming one you believed didn't lie would be more interesting. The problem may be similar to the lie detector problem: if so much of what you say is false and, in some way, you really believe it, it may be indistinguishable from the truth.

"But events such as Fitbit's recent recall of more than 1 million fitness bands over user skin irritations,"

Weird that they pointed this out as a flaw in wearable technology. Isn't that just poor choice in material? Seems like a solved problem to me.

When you are trying to hype the Next Big Thing(tm) it helps to denigrate the current big thing. Also, how big a deal the FitBit recall is is a question of how impirtant that material is to their sensors.

Besides for little 3 month old Annie, you don't want to have to strap something on her.

Let me guess this can have a wide range of applications outside of baby monitoring as well...

Did you mean "baby making" monitoring? ;)

Just as illegal as when you try it with a thermal camera?

I read somewhere ages ago about researchers measuring pulse and respiration of a mobile phone user from the data available to a cellular base station.

Isn't this just RADAR applied at higher resolutions and indoors? I'm sure they've done some really interesting stuff if you dig deep but this doesn't seem like "Wireless" as much as it's transmitting and observing radio reflections[1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar

The article mentioned that there was a ton of noise and the researchers had to use customer filters to remove them.

I wonder how well this technology would work in the real world. There will be a lot more interference and random, unexpected obstacles than in a lab environment.

I guess I object to calling it "Wireless" when it's really just RADAR. It feels like they're trying to use the term wireless to make it less innocuous? I mean if they said they were working on High Resolution hand-held RADAR systems then the public would freak out thinking about the kid in the picture. Meanwhile calling it "wireless" seems to make it ok because we're all exposed to "wireless" with our wifi and wireless phones.

In the end it's all radio with all it's pluses and minuses.

I see the future of purchasing intent based analytic solutions, and it is scary! Now in store mechanisms will not only determine the customer's intent and object/area of interest (this is the current "big thing"), but assess heart rate and infer excitement too!

There you are, beset by a horde of sales people who recoil in horror when they find your elevated heart rate is the wrong kind of excitement, making the potential sale an awkward one:

   "Arghh! Get back! Get back! He's in the adult section!"

We live in interesting times.

The goal of wearables is a focus on the self not the environment - i.e. my digital environment extends out from me, I don't configure my environment to project it onto me.

It's interesting technology, but in a totally different domain to wearables.

Shudder to think of the military applications of this

With autonomous robots.

Direct link: http://newsoffice.mit.edu/2014/could-wireless-replace-wearab...

Thanks. We changed it from http://gigaom.com/2014/06/13/mit-can-now-track-a-heart-rate-....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com