I can see you breathing (Skill Zone News, 28-Jun-2018)
I can see you breathing
Researchers at MIT have come up with a way of looking through the walls of house using the radio waves emitted by WiFi routers as a source of illumination. You are probably thinking that has been done before. Yes, it has, but this one uses AI.
The MIT researchers used radio frequency cameras and around 50 hours of footage of people walking around in a room to train an AI system to recognise the various poses of the human body and convert the data into a series of stick figures. This video shows the results achieved by the system.
When you watched that video, did you find the "heat maps" just as easy to understand as the stick figures? It is hard to see what advantage the stick figures will have, save to say it uses an AI program to achieve it. It seems these days that every new product has to have AI in it somewhere, especially research projects chasing grants.
You might also wonder what the point of such a system is. The potential for surveillance is frightening since it only uses radio signals, doesn't need any visible lighting, and can see clean through the walls and curtains of your house. The authors are quick to dismiss that it is another form of spy technology and say it was developed with social applications in mind, such as monitoring the elderly so that you can detect if they have had a fall and are lying injured. But if that is the purpose of the software, why does it need to see through the walls of a house? Surely, in that situation, it is just as easy to put a camera inside the house with the consent of the person being monitored, and to couple it with other simpler solutions such as a FitBit-style bracelet measuring pulse.
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