Household Radar Can See Through Walls and Knows How You’re Feeling

[gary]

In a 30th May 2019 article (https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/household-radar-can-see-through-walls-and-knows-how-youre-feeling)at the IEEE Spectrum magazine web site,
MIT researcher Fadel Adib reports on his team's work on a low-power
household radar system that is sensitive enough to detect a person's
breathing and heart rate through the other side of a wall.

By making precise measurements and using machine learning, they also
claim they have demonstrated that they can even gauge a person's
emotional state to an impressive degree of accuracy.

How they did it here :-
https://spectrum.ieee.org/telecom/wireless/household-radar-can-see-through-walls-and-knows-how-youre-feeling

[DarkArts]

... or they could just ask. ;)

OK, I can see applications, particularly military, counter-terrorism, law enforcement and rescue roles, in addition to those raised in the article; all basically non-cooperative applications.

[FlashDrive]

Put them in the Prisons .... find out what ' mood ' the prisoner is before opening his cell door ... !!

Col....

[multiweb]

This is unsettling. :scared:

[Wavytone]

The big application will be the security screening at airports both outbound, and for those inbound with illegal stuff in their baggage.

Add to that major public events where crowd safety is an issue.

[billdan]

Where do you buy a "Household Radar system"?

[gary]

Hi Bill,

The authors in the article state they spun off a company, called Emerald, to commercialize the research.

They also state that Emerald’s prototypes are in more than 200 homes,
where they are using them for monitoring test subjects’ sleep and gait.

The focus appears to be primarily medical applications - Parkinson's
Disease, Alzheimers, pulmonary disease, fall monitoring and so on.

As Barack Obama observed, perhaps they could be used as baby monitors.
Cot death syndrome.

Fall monitoring has always been a challenging area in aged-care with
a common reluctance by the person being monitored to have to wear a
fall monitor or the annoyance when it triggers a false alarm.

The authors findings were somewhat serendipitous and there are parallels
between what they are doing and modern astronomy.

For example, consider the information that astronomers manage
to glean from light emanating from some distant star and by
measuring the spectroscopic Doppler shift or a small light dip,
ascertain that the star is being orbited by a planet.

Often the signal to noise ratio is such that the signal is way below the
noise floor and it requires incredibly sensitive instrumentation and
mathematical analysis to extract the signal.

The home radar device faces similar challenges, but rather than use
light it is using a different part of the electromagnetic spectrum
and what's more at incredibly low powers and despite reflections off
walls and other noise sources it can be tuned to even measure the
fluctuations in a human pulse in another room.

The authors state that one day they hope the devices would be available
for purchase by anyone.

Company web site :-
https://www.emeraldinno.com/