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Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

washington.edu

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Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#51

Post by danbruc »

finnw wrote: post #25
rvasa wrote: post #6

Oh the possibilities of this - may be with enough data - you can just wander around a suburb and figure out which houses are currently occupied and which ones are not. - improve aged care by monitoring walking patterns - combine it with some more ingenious technology for localised sound -- you can beam music as I walk around the house (or block out sounds)? - a bit more sensitivity and we can even probably pick up a…

And maybe predict domestic violence before it happens. I'm not sure if I qualify as one of the "privacy folk" or not, but I would say "As long as the police cannot compel you to install the thing and switch it on, or have an AI system issue search warrants in seconds based on what the machine reports." Unfortunately I think we will have both of those things 20 years from now.

There is no need to force anybody to install and turn on anything - they could just passively monitor the signal of your wireless router, our that of your neighbor or of your cellphone. Or they could actively send such a signal and analyze it if they don't care about being detected. In the end it is some kind of (passive) radar and you will probably have to actively jam or block it in order to prevent someone from monitoring you.

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#52

Post by regularfry »

moron4hire wrote: post #18
regularfry wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's going to happen anyway.

probably not, home automation has been "right around the corner" for 60 years.

That's sort of tangential to my point. There are reasons we might not want phased array radar systems picking up every move we make in the privacy of our own homes, independent of home automation applications, which is I presume what the post I was responding to was getting at. My point is that those desires of ours are irrelevant when it comes to whether or not the applications we don't want come to pass, because at some point there's going to be a financial incentive for someone to do it anyway.

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#54

Post by darkarmani »

thinkling wrote: post #14
deserted wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the paper [1] The WiSee proof-of-concept is implemented in GNURadio using the USRP-N210 hardware. Each USRP is equipped with a XCVR2450 daughterboard, and communicates on a 10 MHz channel at 5 GHz. Since USRPN210 boards cannot support multiple daughterboards, we built a MIMO receiver by combining multiple USRP-N210s using an external clock. In our evaluation, we use MIMO receivers that have up to five antennas. W…

I think you'd still have to hack the routers to provide the external clock, as the whole scheme depends on accurate sensor fusion between multiple antennas.

IIRC, I think there are some weird FCC rules about external synchronization of radio transmitters. Using the clock would be ok, but synchronizing using out-of-band signals is a problem for some reason. (This is hazy, but I remember working around issues synchronizing UHF (915MHz) RFID readers).

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#55

Post by stephengillie »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #48

Ok DD-WRT folks, get to it :-) More seriously though, this is a pretty cool thing, using your motion which is blocking wireless signals to detect motion. In hindsight its kind of obvious since people are 'giant waterbags of attenuation' as my RF buddy calls them. This also means you can probably add something of a burglar alarm/motion sensor system to these things, and if you were careful you might be able to see the…

We can track people, cool! And probably kids too! What about dogs and cats? Rats, mice, and cockroaches?

What's the range on this technology, and what happens if we move the router around with us? Maybe we take it to a new building and plug it in there? Or maybe we can use the wifi modules on phones to do this also? It sounds like a great scanning device. And how long before we can also see huge chunks of metal or strong magnets with this technology, based on how radio waves interact with them?

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#56

Post by tzs »

joshdance wrote: post #53

Love this idea. However 94% accuracy is not good enough. You need to be able to trust your action will lead to the desired result. 94% is like Siri getting your whole text message right, but getting the recipient wrong.

A lot depends on what happens the 6% of the time it fails. If failure just means that it fails to recognize that there was a gesture, then 94% is probably fine. It's not that big of a deal to have to gesture twice 6% of the time to turn off a light or skip to the next track.

Failures where the gesture is recognized as another gesture would be a lot more annoying.

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#57

Post by ajvargo »

Someone wrote: post #33
hammock wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your pet turns the shower on? That sounds like a real problem

I think he refers to having a system that, using this approach, turns on his shower when he enters it. If this cannot distinguish humans from cats, it would turn on the shower when a cat entered it. I think that's a bad example. The typical cat would soon learn not to enter the shower.

I'd be more concerned about when your kids figure out the gestures control things.

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#58

Post by chopsueyar »

farnja wrote: post #39
chopsueyar wrote: post #27

Can this differentiate between multiple humans gesturing at the same time (intentional or otherwise)? What about pets moving around or turning the shower on?

" If a person wants to use the WiSee, she would perform a specific repetition gesture sequence to get access to the receiver. This password concept would also keep the system secure and prevent a neighbor – or hacker – from controlling a device in your home. "

Well, my question concerns even the 'specific repetition gesture sequence'.

For instance, if I'm on my couch and perform the gesture while my cat jumps on the couch arm between myself and the WiSee, what happens?

Or my cat is in the other room, but walks in front of the WiSee while I'm performing the gesture, what happens?

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#59

Post by chopsueyar »

freehunter wrote: post #34
TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think they are still a bit too expensive for people. You can either get a whole system for several dozen kUSD, or single elements (e.g. smart outlets) for ~$100 each. The former is a significant expense people might not want to pay at once when buying homes, and the latter is a bit too expensive to buy one by one, because you require to have at least few of those devices before the system starts to get useful.

It's not nearly that expensive, though. A light socket is in the neighborhood of $15. A wall socket is less than $25. A transceiver is $30. For just over $100 you can get the controlling software, two wall switches, two light sockets, and a transceiver. http://www.thehomeautomationstore.com/x10-home-automation.ht...

Oh, but don't use CFL bulbs with those wall switches or light sockets.

...and good luck determining whether the device is on or off.

Re: Wi-Fi signals enable gesture recognition throughout entire home

#60

Post by rz2k »

fbeeper wrote: post #42

I'm nowhere near to be techno-apocalyptic, but I just thought that from a "1984" point of view it could be a tool to monitor activities without no permission at all.

And wearing a tin foil hat just makes you a better reflector!

Anyway, if you look up through-wall radar detection, most of the implementations use S-band radar, and it is probably safe to assume that it's already been figured out how to use wifi stations and devices already in place emitting signals to each other, rather than always needing to bring additional equipment.

With regard to privacy though, it seems like it would be data and computationally intensive to track the movements of people in a large number of houses.

Let's say that a hypothetical application could only detect velocities away from or toward the base station, but no directional information. With each movement you make it would build a set of hypotheses about your location. Then when you make another movement, it would need to branch out, and create an entire set of hypotheses for each hypothesis in the previous set, and so on with each movement. While the program could abandon entire branches when they showed you walking through a wall, it would still grow very quickly.

Though it is possible to mine data of cell phone locations and CC television cameras after the fact, it seems like (if my understanding of how the technology would work is anything near reality) it is simply too difficult to collect a lot of information about people's movements in their homes without a specific prior reason to justify the expense.

Anyway, perhaps rather than tinfoil hats, people worried about surveillance should hang lots of mobile sculptures in their houses to create confounding noise instead.

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