Wi-fi signal tracks heartbeat without wearables

https://spectrum.ieee.org/wi-fi-signal-heartbeat-detection

by JeanKage • 10 months ago

103 81 10 months ago

spectrum.ieee.org

fragmede2• 10 months ago

What's scary is that Comcast will be using this to spy on people, and that's going to get back to the government and the cops and the new gestapo will also have that. Not to get all conspiracy theory on y'all.

bigmattystyles• 10 months ago

I may actually wrap myself in tin foil!

bee_rider• 10 months ago

It’s absurd to think they’d do such a thing.

Checking if your phone is attached to their router is much less signal processing!

ortusdux• 10 months ago

https://www.xfinity.com/hub/smart-home/wifi-motion

fragmede2• 9 months ago

Haha fair. The current technology is fairly limited and doesn't work through walls, but if we handwave that it will in the future, and if you're living in a an apartment complex and the neighbors have Comcast and you don't, it seems like a bit of more of a problem.

transpute4• 9 months ago

"Xfinity using WiFi signals in your house to detect motion", 500 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44426726#44427986

heavyset_go2• 9 months ago

They already are. Their app advertises an option to determine how many people are in your home via Comcast WiFi right now, not using connections to devices, but radar. I don't think Comcast will stop at just that.

qwertox• 10 months ago

In 10 years even through walls, probably.

ge96• 10 months ago

Elementary Watson, we simply observed the swaying motion of the fly's winds to determine the heart rate

gavmor• 10 months ago

We already can see through walls using wifi:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2301.00250

transpute4• 9 months ago

14 years ago (2011), https://news.mit.edu/2011/ll-seeing-through-walls-1018

RcouF1uZ4gsC• 10 months ago

Anybody remember the heartbeat scanner in Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six?

XorNot• 10 months ago

Yep. But my first thought on usage was "man this will make detecting home occupancy simpler" (till it turns out you can't distinguish from pets I suppose).

conception• 10 months ago

Pet heart-rates probably fairly different and “quieter”.

sfourdrinier• 10 months ago

Oh yes, I've been actually looking at integrating this and other mmwave research into my startup https://trackourhearts.com

Non-intrusive technology which can work at home to monitor people' vitals is a game changer, there are so many applications to this. Research is at the beginning.

Indeed there are privacy issues with big providers doing this, but then this really opens up so many possibilities if done well.

NedF• 10 months ago

[flagged]

lukeschlather• 10 months ago

If I could take my watch off while I sleep and still get good heart rate / sleep tracking from devices positioned around my bed that would be great. My watch can cause skin irritation and I find it valuable but not having it on while I sleep would probably be healthier. Also as I get older if I could put a wifi device in each room that did active tracking and not have to carry a device I need to keep charged that would be great for life alert style thing, and general health monitoring.

ACCount37• 10 months ago

You're making a lot of loud baseless claims really quick, aren't you?

Radar technology isn't some kind of forbidden magic. Can you do radar sensing with 2.4GHz? Yes, absolutely. Now, can you do it well, with an off-the-shelf Wi-Fi chipset, and get down to heartbeat monitoring? Only if the chipset was designed for it. Very few existing chipsets are. Still a new experimental thing.

For practical applications today, I would look instead at things like dedicated mmWave 24GHz radar chips instead - they're getting cheap now. For the future? If chip vendors that ship the usual 2.4GHz/5GHz MIMO router chipsets start putting the relevant features in, the idea would be worth visiting.

idiotsecant3• 10 months ago

If I had the ability to track users heart rates in response to advertisements, media, political content, etc that would be quite valuable for producing content that better captured users and made them feel what I wanted them to feel. Heart rate says a lot about what we're feeling and our attention, especially if you have it all the time and can match it to what we're looking at.

dang2• 10 months ago

We've banned this account for repeatedly breaking the site guidelines badly. Not sure what's going on here, but you've been posting like this a lot, and that's not ok.

If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. They're here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.

anigbrowl3• 10 months ago

Indeed there are privacy issues with big providers doing this

And if they offer you enough money to acquire the company, you'll take it, because if not you then someone else will do it. Humanity is not in fact crying out for a better panopticon.

sciencejerk• 10 months ago

I wish Wifi would be restricted for network use and not (invisible, non-consensual) surveillance or monitoring of any kind. Maybe it's time to start contacting regulators, who probably have no idea about this

blurbleblurble4• 10 months ago

Unfortunately it's kind of hard to truly restrict its usage. The data transmission and sensing capabilities of WiFi are two sides of the same coin: flashing morse code via a light into a room also makes it possible for anyone with eyes to see what's in the room. WiFi uses non-visible radiation but the same principle applies. What's more, higher transmission rates are made possible by higher frequencies of radiation which have physically more capacity for information density, whether information encoded into the radiation by a special device or encoded into it from from interaction with the environment.

If you want more information about this whole thing as an engineering project, check this comment from a few years back with lots of links: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22480444

therein• 9 months ago

It is kind of hard to truly restrict its usage sure but how about we don't create IEEE standards for it.

You would get uncomfortable seeing an IEEE 802.11dp that's able determine if you're wearing an underwear that day, but they are going in that direction.

vasco2• 9 months ago

I guess what the mean is the same way spark gap transmitters are forbidden. Anyone can do it but it's forbidden. Anyone can read the wifi signals but CISCO doesn't have to sell you a dashboard with real time view of your location and everyone walking through it with all the websites they visited since they walked in, last time they were at your location, average time they are there, to communicate to a store in the mall that you're almost in front of it so it sends you a push notification with an ad, etc.

AnthonyMouse2• 9 months ago

Unfortunately it's kind of hard to truly restrict its usage.

Is it? You require any wireless device to have open source firmware and then people can a) inspect what the existing firmware is doing and b) replace it if it's doing anything they don't want it to.

It's a matter of replacing the existing obscurity-focused laws discouraging them from doing this with the security-focused ones that require them to.

The benefits in terms of right-to-repair and ability to patch vulnerabilities in devices the OEM has abandoned redound on top of this.

greiskul• 9 months ago

And it's also kind of hard to restrict shoplifting, people can just take products and hide it in their clothes. Doesn't mean that as a society we can't do anything, we can make it clear through regulation what is legal or not for manufactures to make and sell.

transpute4• 9 months ago

Grounded radiant barrier (matte white vinyl with aluminum on reverse side) in 48" rolls will block wifi and temperature for $0.25 per sq ft.

2023, https://www.policemag.com/technology/article/15541542/first-...

“Once you place it against the wall, it takes one scan to show you where everything is, then over time anything that moves will pop up.. It can detect someone moving through the room or someone sitting on the couch and breathing. The small movements of breathing are enough for the radar to discriminate between the couch and the person.”

2015, https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/2015/01/19/police-radar-...'

At least 50 U.S. law enforcement agencies have secretly equipped their officers with radar devices that allow them to effectively peer through the walls of houses to see whether anyone is inside.. The radars were first designed for use in Iraq and Afghanistan. They represent the latest example of battlefield technology finding its way home to civilian policing and bringing complex legal questions with it.

vasco2• 9 months ago

The police in Netherlands also operates these from inside vans. Most likely other countries too. They do this most busy weekends in the Dam Square for example. You walk by you get a full body scan to see if you have weapons on you I guess. I hope they like my butt.

heavyset_go2• 9 months ago

It's built into the WiFi 7 standard.

A lot of spaces you assumed were private are no longer so.

slipnslider• 10 months ago

I believe this was posted to HN about a month ago and had a good discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127983

loverofhumanz13• 10 months ago

It could be used to scan people's heart rates when they're in a high security line (military check points, airports, embassies) to detect people who are nervous.

I assume some places already use thermal cameras to detect people who are sweating profusely.

Using both together might be a decent way of flagging people who might otherwise slip through security.

Of course there would be many false positives, so it wouldn't be good enough on its own.

andrepd4• 10 months ago

Yep, that's definitely what we need more of right now, not less.

loverofhumanz13• 10 months ago

What's the objection? I don't see how having my heart rate scanned at an airport or military checkpoint in any way impinges on my freedom or happiness.

lima• 10 months ago

Dubious utility aside, this is a solved problem using mmWave.

Google even ships it in some Nest displays for sleep tracking...

loverofhumanz13• 10 months ago

Wifi seems much more capable and harder to defeat? A heavy coat could defeat mmWave, I believe.

AngryData2• 10 months ago

That is the same excuse cops regularly use to violate peoples rights and justify illegal searches and stops or claim they are impaired when they aren't. The very fact that people are being closely watched or monitored is in itself a reason for people to be nervous.

loverofhumanz13• 9 months ago

Yes, some people will be stressed and nervous for benign reasons. Criminals will also be stressed and nervous.

A good security system will use multiple signals to filter out false-positives.

tomrod• 10 months ago

How long until this is made into employer monitoring software?

dinobones• 10 months ago

Almost every single one of these "using WiFi to do X! Crazy!" articles always requires some crazy amount of calibration / training requirement.

It's like me telling you: With using just audio I can trace your exact coordinates! ... By using an array of microphones in a room.

sdf4j• 10 months ago

That’s the point, with wifi you already have the array of microphones in the room.

est• 10 months ago

Let me guess, it use some kind of ESP32?

opens article

First, the researchers had seven volunteers sit in a chair at various distances of 1, 2, and 3 meters from two ESP32 microcontrollers that used Pulse-Fi to estimate the volunteers’ heart rates

Yup

protocolture2• 10 months ago

Kinda crazy the arc that 60GHz has taken over the years.

Like ages ago it was going to be Intels docking station standard (WiGig). It died, companies like IgniteNet bought up all the Dell wigig chips, and used them to prototype P2P wireless radios, ultimately building out a new class of metro p2p wireless used by every major vendor. Then it became a component of 5G, mostly used for backhaul but still capable in a lot of Massive MIMO handsets. Some handsets trialling it for in home wifi. And now the chips are probably going back into your laptops/Homes to detect your biometrics.

6SixTy• 10 months ago

Not even 60GHz. We're talking 2.4/5 here

protocolture2• 9 months ago

Oh thats cool. I just saw a reference to ESP32 and I know they do a 60GHz heart rate unit. Some HA guys have been using it

transpute4• 9 months ago

your laptops/Homes to detect your biometrics

Intel laptop demo (shipping since 2023), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127983#45130061

alberth• 10 months ago

260 comments | 1 month ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127983

dang2• 10 months ago

Thanks! Macroexpanded:

WiFi signals can measure heart rate - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45127983 - Sept 2025 (262 comments)

dzhiurgis• 9 months ago

This would be great for smart home if it can accurately detect which room you are in.

thomascountz• 9 months ago

Nick Bild replicated the paper and shared their build on hackaday.io.

https://hackaday.io/project/204077-measuring-heart-rate-usin...

Wi-fi signal tracks heartbeat without wearables

Related Stories