The Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11096342/metrics#metrics
This is very cool and useful, but at the same time very concerning. While I see a lot of good use cases for this ranging from hospitals to stress recognition in animals I Am also quite scared, that big corporations will use this to spy on us. Luckily currently it is only possible to measure the pulse at about 3m, but it should be possible to increase the range. It may fall short when multiple persons are in detection range, but as far as I have read from the paper they did not test this.
Article is paywalled for me.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is “wifi” just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
Yeah sadly it is paywalled, but I have been lucky enough to get access to it through my university.
Heres what I found regarding your question in the article:
Fig 1 illustrates Pulse-Fi’s system architecture which consists of three main components: data collection using commodity Wi-Fi devices, a CSI signal processing pipeline, and a custom lightweight Long Short Term Memory neural network for heart rate estimation.
Fig 1:
And this is the Setup they used to collect the ESP-HR-CSI Dataset (left site) and the one that other researchers used to collect the E-Health Dataset (right side):
The parts on how they collected the data:
A. ESP-HR-CSI Dataset
We collected the ESP-HR-CSI dataset from seven participants (5 male, 2 female) in a room of a public indoor library. It was collected using two ESP32 devices, one as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. The sampling rate is 80 Hz, with a 20 MHz bandwidth with 64 subcarriers positioned at different distances. Each participant was measured at distances of 1,2 and 3 m for 5 minutes each. The participants sat in a chair between the devices and wore a pulse oximeter on their finger to collect ground-truth information as seen inB. E-Health Dataset
The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.Each participant performed 17 standardized positions or activities, with each position held for 60 seconds.
To me it sounds like, that they really just used standard WIFI to collect the data (this is especially true for the E-Health Dataset), since all the processing gets done on the Raspberry Pi.
B. E-Health Dataset
The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.does that mean a passive observer can do all that observations? and that a raspberry pi, with its single average antenna is capable of this?
Sure, everyone is getting spied on by everyone because everyone is so damned important to everyone.
Let’s try again: someone is getting spied on by someone because someone is so damned important to someone. And there’s a lot of someones.
Health data is extremely valuable. You can use it to serve more personalised ads or even use it to, as example, define prices for health insurance. When you combine it with lots of other data it becomes even more valuable. Also never forget, big corporations track literally everything. Why not add your heart rate.
Not everyone, just Americans and other surveillance states. I have no idea about Canada but probably you too.
Where do you live that you don’t think America is spying on you too?
America 😂 it’s at least theoretically possible to avoid American companies outside of America. In practice, you’re certainly correct.
Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”
We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?
WiFi can also do pretty precise location. Bluetooth/BLE even more precise (inches or less)
I think they mean without a phone. A 2.4ghz radio can be used as a presence detection radar.
I think it can also detect our neural frequencies, aka ‘read our minds’. That’s why we see ads for things we thought about but never even searched for.
Dog… What?
https://www.neurology.columbia.edu/news/mind-reading-technology-can-turn-brain-scans-language
We already live in a world with existing, functional mind-reading devices. There is even a device designed to help people that are suffering from ALS communicate by reading their thoughts, and has a privacy feature where the user can activate and deactivate the device by thinking a password in their mind, in order to allow them to still have private thoughts.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/new-brain-device-is-first-to-read-out-inner-speech/
Phones are not fMRIs though.
Also: wifi can read my mind.
Fucking lmfao
Android throttles the hell out of WiFi requests since (I think) Android 9. You need to manually allow WiFi request spamming in developer options to let apps do something like determining location from it.
I’m pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.
But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.
That makes sense. I assume these exotic ability’s require precise control of the radios. So, for now, until an API made, we should be safe.
“Google enters the chat”
Suddenly your new dishwasher sends your health protocols to your doc. The fancy toilet helped with a consistency analysis and your smart lamps add a sleeping protocol.
Maybe not eye tracking, but probably head tracking.
Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)
Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.
GrapheneOS does allow you to turn it off. It has a permission switch for your phone sensors. I don’t know if there are other versions of android that allow the same.
How much longer until I can be like “Hey, Google; scan the area for lifeforms?”
“Sure, turning on all downstairs lights”
“Opening the pod bay doors”
0 days
robo voice: There are
352hot, single women in your area.
Wow, all that with an esp32. No fancy hardware needed.
Which means we can have that data in Home Assistant sooner or later🤔
So how long before our phones can measure heart rate from your pocket, or being held in your hand?
It’s probably possible right now.
They already can by putting your finger on the camera and lighting up your finger with the led light. Then it detects the rhythmic changes picked up by the camera… At least 10+ years ago. It was a good novelty feature, but turns out, for most healthy people, checking your heart rate gets old after a few runs.
Cool tech but I question it’s usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who’s on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they’re suddenly in afib, not that they’re a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
Alright give it another 50 grand in investment and give them an access point instead of a $2 WiFi device, you’ll have it
Well some darker entities probably would appreciate access to this tech. In order to confirm mission complete if you smell what I am cooking.
They mentioned apnea.
And I guarantee some organization will figure out how to use this for some police state bullshit.
That’s already the original use case. Cardiac signature biometrics, can install in a doorway and do identity verification and track/monitor every individual that passes through the threshold
People do not have that distinct cardiac ECG profiles, and it would be wrong after one coffee.
Holy shit the US state paranoia in the sub. Buy more guns.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9921530/
I wouldn’t be as sure about that as you are
3 letter agencies have already been using this for cardiac signature identity verification and tracking for a long while
Is this good? I can’t help but think it’s just another datapoint for google to scrape
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
In a world where private health care is the norm, yes. In a country with Public health care is the main provider of health it isn’t.
What?
Edited for better comprehension. I didn’t have my coffee, sorry
Yeah I’m with you.
“Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good”
“Not in countries where health care is publicly run”
“What” is the correct response here.
It has nothing to do with that. This is about privacy and data security.
If we think about the applications of the technology to the benefit of someone’s health I think it’s really cool.
Needless to say it does pose a risk to our privacy and data security if used with an intention to monitor ones health without their consent.
Real question: how do you stop this?
I don’t use wifi at all in my home but I live in an apartment and all my neighbours obviously do.
How in the hell do I stop this from getting into my home?
Wear an aluminum foil vest and a Faraday suit. Burn your computer after reading, I’ve said too much…
Put the house in a faraday cage?
With 6 ghz wifi you’d need a cage with a size of around 1mm irc.
Copper mesh fabric.
Foil is cheap enough and a good isolator for plenty of things.
So if you don’t want someone to measure your heartbeat and to physically know where you are at all times your only option is to cover your entire living area, including the windows, in aluminum foil?
I guess what I’m getting at here is that this situation is deeply, deeply fucked.
Own the network. Run OSS.
That’s about it.
“Howdy neighbour. Your wireless modem/router combo is mine now. Thxkbye”
Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right through whole time.
Innocuous radio signals are one thing but if my apartment is inundated with radio waves that can literally be used to track my movements and monitor my heartbeat, being forced to allow this is a perverse and sickening invasion of privacy.
Yes, 20 people at a government agency are watching you watch Netflix and taking a shit.
the problem is that you don’t need 20 people for this kind of thing. you can just kinda passively slurp the data up from every router and throw it into a machine learning model to be used by cops or sold to advertisers. you don’t need a human in the loop anywhere and it’s essentially impossible to opt out of
If you think the lack of privacy is bad now, just wait till they use this to target done strikes. We’re all in for super fun times.
Your neighbors WIFI signals are too weak to matter in this case. Even if they were strong enough, this is a receiver-transmitter setup, so it would still be impossible to do unless you connect to their network. Even then, they’d have to assume you’re the only person present between the transmitter and the receiver.
Presence detection through WIFI was already garbage enough, this one is plain unusable.
Good to know.
The stuff I’ve read about recently tracking movements using wifi - would this need more powerful radio waves than most people use or no?
2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
I’ve heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.
Good point. A US department store chain – Kohl’s – has been using electronic shelf labels that change several times per day. Not sure how they handle the discrepancies. How do I prove the product was prices $1 when I picked it up if the label now says $2? Is it my responsibility to notice the register price was different?
I more or less avoided Kohl’s, so I’m not sure how that was handled.
The only solution for that which I see is taking photos of the labels for every product taken off the shelf, but that’s quite the imposition obviously. Trouble is there are no laws guiding these practices, and the result is going to be quite the mess for customers to understand.
In my opinion, the best purchasing experience for this type of shopping is using a handheld device with which you both scan the product as you take it off the shelf, and also process payment on your way to the exit. No cashier lines, and even better, no more unloading and repacking of your items just to purchase them. From the shelf into your bag, only back out again in your kitchen.
On another note, it boggles my mind to see the square footage used by all these self checkout machines when these terminal systems exist. Sadly I’ve never used one in North America. This is an aspect of shopping that could make me loyal to a single vendor. I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I would actually install the vendor’s phone app if they built in this functionality instead of having these terminals.
I think you’re right, but I dread it. I avoid installing apps. The thought of installing even more tracking for multiple vendors annoys me.
Although I am resistant, your point about bagging once is a true benefit.
One downside, that system doesn’t seem to support cash.I didn’t give the privacy concern much thought in the moment, mainly thinking how useless and poorly designed those apps usually are, but I do agree.
Considering it now, I do have loyalty cards in my company vehicle for certain things, primarily fuel, and those of course remain in that vehicle as they serve no other purpose. Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal. Though ideally I’d imagine a few dedicated handheld terminals kept in store for redundancy purposes.
Speaking of redundancy, you’re right about paying in cash. Perhaps as easy as a ‘cash’ button and it would send the purchase total to a customer service desk. Around here, all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets and gift cards and such.
Though it would be funny to see these handheld terminals have a compartment to accept notes and coins haha.
Perhaps keeping an old phone for purposes of doing this scanning thing might be ideal.
That’s an excellent idea!all grocers have a ‘cashier’ desk where you get lottery tickets.
Ha! Great observation. There’s no way in hell stores are going to give up on gambling cash. :-)
I’m f’d my resting BPM is like 90.
That’s quite high.
90 is damn near perfect for most adults. It’s a little high for children, but even for most teens that would be right in the middle of “the green zone.” My resting heart rate of 60 is way too low especially combined with my regular blood pressure of 100/50
90 is poor health health. 72 is average, but that is also poor.
Hm I’m not sure I’d say it’s perfect? I thought 70-80 was?
My cardiologist said it isn’t really “danger zone”, but if it were like 100+ it might be concerning.
I have had all the scans done, including a close look at my hearteries, and everything came back (surprisingly) clean.
One day, WiFi might even be usable as a method for making a reliable network connection
Just imagine how much humanity could benefit if sharing and accessing knowledge was freely available for almost anyone
The problem is not sharing and accessing, but generating. If we had a system where people would be paid for generating knowledge, then they wouldn’t have to charge for accessing knowledge.
That’s why a lot more research should be paid for by the government. In exchange, government-funded research would be excluded from having patents and/or copyright.
Goverment funded research is paid for my public money via taxes but the research information is not publicly accessible, I can understand this if it’s defense or other secretive research but there is no reason someone should have to pay for access to other research fields information when it is publicly funded
is it not?
Depends on how specific the information is and how well it’s hidden among alternative facts
One can dream. For now though it’s the one radio my phone doesn’t use. Mobile network tunneling through Bluetooth baby! My atrial fibrillation when remain between me and my meth dealer! Shout out to Craig!
Oh, the person selling you medical or life insurance is gonna love this…
I am not surprised. Passive WiFi was introduced nearly a decade ago, so it makes sense that measurement systems based on WiFi have come a long way since. It’s frightening, honestly.
Insurance companies…sorry you’re denied for being a health risk…we can see from your home internet that you’re an unhealthy person
Remember kids, you can buy your own home fiber router! Don’t live with someone else’s equipment between you and the internet.
Care to explain what you mean? Are you saying you can run fiber in your house? Doesn’t that still require some form of equipment from an ISP to actually go out to the internet?
The fiber line into your house from the ISP is needed. What that fiber line connects to is up to you. The router your ISP provides isn’t special. You can get your own equipment.
I’m not super familiar with fiber. There’s no modem or anything needed? Don’t they still track data usage? Are they able to do that without any intermediate equipment?
