Wifi Signals Can Measure Heart Rate

The Star Trek series require a lot of suspension of disbelief, especially since in the years after it came out real life technology surpassed the stuff depicted in there. Like, in TNG people walking around with glorified e-readers but having to go to the big computer or to ask Alexa things instead of just tapping on their screens.

At least they got OLED style touch screens, and for a while it looked like everything would go that way but at least in cars some are going back to physical buttons.

Oh, it gets worse. Either Kirk or Spock should have hung for that episode - not for the thing Kirk was on trial for, but for leaving the entire ship unmanned, and for allowing that guy to terminally sabotage it, all to do some theatrics for the judge and jury. That is a criminal level of negligence - surely it was in violation of some minimal crewing requirement for a vessel of that size.

I also have to wonder what the 'dead' guy's plan was after Kirk would get convicted for his death. Presumably he'd need to climb out of whatever rathole he was hiding in for breakfast, and I'd presume someone on the ship would notice that the dead guy is alive, and that the conviction should be overturned.

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Truly, the level of and attention to security on the Enterprise-C was shameful. In "The Conscience of a King" (an excellent episode), one of the traveling actors manages to - not only steal a weapon - presumably from the armory - but also rig it to explode and plant it in the Captain's quarters.

Starfleet in that era should have seriously formed an independent, no-bullshit, no-nonsense commission to ask the relevant enlisted and commissioned officers pressing questions, like 'Did you, or did you not leave the hatch coaming on Deck C open, thus allowing an enemy agent access to the arms locker? Are you in collusion with enemy agents?'

There's a single DS9 episode[0] where they reveal that the Captain can actually spy on everyone on the ship at once. Like tap into a video feed and listen to conversations. But then we never see this happen again.

My headcannon for this is that even though it's technically possible, it's so unethical they just choose to never do it.

[0] https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Valiant_(episode)#:~:te...

My phone can hear me and answer whenever I talk to it, but I still prefer to push a button first (kinda intercom), or even just type :)

Close enough

Isn't it the other way around? Germany actually has it made easier to operate a public wifi by limiting the liability on the side of the wifi provider with their mid 2010s legislation.

seeing a theme here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45121617

Guys, they can just ask social media Corp A where you are. They don't need no fancy tech here.

Just think about it, folks.

We are now in an era where we all need to learn how to regulate and modulate our own heartbeats.

Will we at some point have any rights over our biorhythmic signatures?

If not, then I will have to learn how to apply a modulation to my own internal oscillations, such that the algorithm is gonna have to use quantum power to decrypt how I'm feeling.

It's an excellent time to buy your own device for wifi broadcasting and disable any ISP provided broadcasting (or maybe put it in a faraday cage?) - it's relatively simple to set up with off the shelf components though less technically minded people may struggle with it. There's still a pretty robust market of options and the devices have gotten pretty feature rich with things like mesh networking support being pretty standard.

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.

There's plenty of wristbands and rings with health tracking.

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.

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.

[1] - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6847948

Comcast renting out wifi hardware to all of their customers, and already bringing that technology to the masses should be concerning to you then.

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.

Whole-home gesture recognition sounds really cool! Has anyone actually got this running?

It has been IEEE standardized and shipping commercially for several years.

Or swallowed :p

A camera detects light. Light can certainly be dangerous to you.

I prefer my wavefunction non-collapsed.

Unsolicited remote sonograms are stopped by walls, floors, ceilings and doors, unlike wireless radio networks.

                        800Mhz     1900Mhz
  1/2" Drywall          2.03 dB    2.43 dB
  Venetian Plaster      7.91 dB    16.22 dB
  6" Concrete Wall      10.11 dB   19.41 dB
  Glass Window          4.35 dB    4.38 dB
  Low Emission Glass    33.8 dB    33.8 dB
  Brick                 7.57 dB    14.66 dB
  Solid Wooden Door     6.11 dB    12.33 dB

Sound can certainly be dangerous to you.

Ultrasound can be used to blast tumours or break kidney stones. And according to Wikipedia there seems to be a really weird correlation between having an ultrasound and being lefthanded. But that sounds almost too ridiculous to be true.

you can get RF burns from VHF/UHF/microwave frequencies with milliwatts if you somehow short the transmission line across yourself, even though the actual voltage and amperage going across your skin is practically infinitesimal. the amount of contact - if any - needed decreases with the RF power. wifi is "legal" up to 1W EIRP, which means a unity gain antenna capable device can output 1000mW at the terminal.

the FCC "considers 50 watts to be the lowest power above which radiation must be considered [...]" for radio transmitters. in 1996.

further:

> Conversely, lower frequencies penetrate deeper; at 5.8 GHz (3.2 mm) the depth most of the energy is dissipated in the first millimeter of the skin; the 2.45 GHz frequency microwaves commonly used in microwave ovens can deliver energy deeper into the tissue; the generally accepted value is 17 mm for muscle tissue.

> The damage can be spread over a large area, when the source is a relatively distant energy radiator, or a very small (though possibly deep) area, when the body comes to a direct contact with the source (e.g. a wire or a connector pin).

note the microwave 2.45GHz part says frequency, not wattage, power, whatever. a home router's antenna's radome (or rubber duck or whatever) touching your arm will penetrate it quite far.

anyhow i've gotten RF burns before, just to see if it was BS or not, at real low wattage (around 1W at the terminal) and it leaves a discolored mark on your skin in a straight line between the contact points and feels like you got a small burn there. The frequency i "burned" myself with was ~145MHz.

This is all to say "it doesn't matter if it's ionizing, it still heats things up."

ETA:

> Frequencies considered especially dangerous occur where the human body can become resonant, at 35 MHz, 70 MHz, 80-100 MHz, 400 MHz, and 1 GHz

OK, I can do that.

Your comment should not be gray, as you've stated a rarely known fact. I used to have an old brochure with the exact model number of the device you refer to. And it's been around for well over a decade.

I'll try to find the model to rescue your post. People can be so fucking unreasonable here it makes me sad.

But I know exactly what you're referring to.

Note: it's also worth considering its applications in parallel construction and that it's indeed so rarely known, that it doesn't require a warrant.

Edit: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Range-R

Edit II: they were, at one time around 2011 definitely having a lot of fun with these devices in my town here in Florida.

Edit III: also of interest, https://camero-tech.com/

Edit IV: https://www.policemag.com/technology/article/15541542/first-... - Detex Pro, by MaXentric

You can buy them on Aliexpress for $5. YouTube and a cursory google search will give you many many options to choose from for examples and tutorials.

Unfortunately no. But fortunately, it isn't something new I have built. I use a Seed Studio sensor MR60BHA2 which has an ESP32 which sends the data to Home Assistant through ESPHome. Once it is in Home Assistant you can do automations and notifications. I mostly use it for elderly care. I have another DFRobot C1001 sensor but waiting for ESPHome to add support for it. It has fall detection also which is why I am planning to replace it. They are fairly accurate; ~90%; has been my experience. They work better when mounted on ceiling and have a cone like coverage.

"Low cost mmWave 60GHz radar sensor for advanced sensing" (2025), 50 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44665982

"Inside a $1 radar motion sensor" (2024), 100 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40834349

"mmWave radar, you won't see it coming" (2022), 180 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30172647

"What Is mmWave Radar?: Everything You Need to Know About FMCW" (2022), 30 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35312351

Infineon 60GHz IoT FMCW radar modules have all datasheets published. That's super rare for Infineon - usually they are the worst NDA-hell on earth.

Chinese vendors sell uC+Radar-Module units on Aliexpress for around ~20-30€. They Infineon-based boards are super easy to spot by looking at the Antenna-on-Chip layout.

You can cut off their head (microcontroller) and directly attach your favorite uC onto the SPI bus to talk to them. Or use the existing one.. not overly complicated to reverse engineer the schematic.

Example: MicRadar RA60ATR2

posted some details at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45150761. happy to answer any additional queries you may have.

I think it's safe to say that most smart TVs are wireless and will stay that way. Personally, I have no problem streaming 4K content to my TV over my wifi. Adding wires where they're not needed is what's silly.

Tracking people walking through malls. Or even better: tracking everyone in the sidewalk of a NYC street after they commit a crime and where they end up at.

from the linked article: But gaits, like faces, are not necessarily distinctive. An individual’s cardiac signature is unique, though, and unlike faces or gait, it remains constant and cannot be altered or disguised.

Or is it?

Generally I think this is called "tomography" (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomographic_reconstruction) i.e. the reconstruction of higher dimensional data from lower dimensional data. Your brain can do it automatically in a lot of cases. For example if you see the shadow of a rotating cube on the wall, your brain can reconstruct 3d information about the cube even though you only have access to a 2d projection

Getting it to sort-of-work is fairly easy. Getting it to work well on off-the-shelf hardware without a precisely controlled environment is hell.

For practical applications right now, you'd want a dedicated radar unit at 24GHz or so, probably with two separate reception paths too.

Eventually, we might get usable radar functionality in default Wi-Fi chips with 5GHz/6GHz Wi-Fi and MIMO - but it's not there yet.

Try using this you just need an esp32 devkit nodemcu style pcb. It measures movement though.

https://github.com/espressif/esp-csi

In my experience aallll of these fancy "we can measure things that sound impossible" papers come with the asterisk "in perfect lab conditions".

> “The signal is very sensitive to the environment, so we have to select the right filters to remove all the unnecessary noise,” Bhatia said.

AKA "it barely works and we had to filter the signal to the gills to get anything at all".

It's a really impressive tech demo but the article is selling it as if this might actually work in the real world and it clearly won't.

i get asked about stuff like this from time to time and i always say "no, that's impossible" because i have ethics. The common retort is "well, i heard it was being used at <x>." and a client never contacting me again, which is fine.