No clunky wearables? No chest strap on the treadmill? Heart rate and respiration? Monitors everyone in the house simultaneously 24/7 on a cheap rpi? I hope this doesn't take years to come to market because this seems incredibly useful.
There are positive sci-fi use cases, but ONLY IF the data and automation are entirely under control of the human subjects, e.g. self-hosted home server, local GPUs, local LLM, offline voice recognition, private 3D imaging of home and human, etc.
Sensing is (sadly) already part of Wi-Fi 7. If you have a recent Intel, AMD or Qualcomm device from the past few years, it's likely physically capable of detecting human presence and/or activity (e.g. breathing rate, keystrokes, hand gestures). It can also be done with $20 ESP32 devices + OSS firmware. The open questions are on custody and legal usage of CSI measurements, not their existence.
Alexa: "I sounds like you're having sex. Would you like me to play Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor on Spotify and schedule a breakfast delivery through GrubHub?"
I don't want the data under my control - I want it under my doctors control. Except if it decects a coming heart attack or such, then notify every emt.
I want my doctor as agent to delegate to other specialists without consulting me. Most of the time it isn't needed but I don't want to be bothered for 'just double checking this is nothing' which should happen at times.
Could also see the value of this for caregiving. I caretake for my grandmother, and even something as simple as keeping airtags on her keys has been a challenge. It would be impossible for her to consistently wear some wearable health device / life alert / etc. passive health monitoring that’s not intrusive would be amazing.
Not an expert, but I suspect for many there are warning signs that someone may die in their sleep (or exercising, or ???) long before the heart finally quits. This seems like a great way to monitor for that.
I’m an EMT, so not the deepest level of knowledge, but certain progressive things that will kill you (such as sepsis) would show noticeable trending in basic vitals like heart rate and respiratory rate. And sepsis is also common in geriatrics (catheter / surgery / G tube -> infection -> sepsis)
I've not followed any evolutions in this area, but there's a cool paper from 2014 about using WiFi channel state information to detect 87%(!) of falls in an experimental condition[1]. It's been a while since I read the paper, and I no longer have access, so caveats aplenty, but it's one of those things that pops into my head sometimes and I wonder if it's seen any real-world deployment.
Seems like it would be really useful in a hospital setting as well. Instead of having to wear the heart rate monitors, etc. during recovery or a stress test it could be wireless.
IDK what the error rate of gestural recognition with Wifi is. FWIU the market for e.g. the Magic Leap gestural peripheral just wasn't there. That paper says 2013.
I feel this technology would creep people out so much that anyone in the wifi space would be actively hostile towards these things. Maybe they'll lock it behind patents? I doubt governments would want this to become common knowledge either.
