MIT Researchers Can Take Your Pulse, Right Through the Walls

An anonymous reader writes MIT researchers develop technology that can monitor people's breathing and heart rate through walls. 'Their latest report demonstrates that they can now detect gestures as subtle as the rise and fall of a person's chest. From that, they can determine a person's heart rate with 99 percent accuracy. The research could be used for health-tracking apps, baby monitors, and for the military and law enforcement.' The report describes how they extended their through-wall technology to up to five users and how they track vital signs.

Comments

Horseshit

[dcollins]

"The research could be used for health-tracking apps, baby monitors, and for the military and law enforcement."

Yeah, lead with the health-tracking and baby monitors, which actually benefits the subject, such that the subject would happily allow a monitor right next to them, and thus "through the walls" monitoring will never, ever get used.

Bury the bit about using it shoot people who break a drug law, or a resister of some foreign tyranny, in a way that they never have a chance to see it coming, which is how this will actually get used.

Ugh.

Re:More Uses for Aluminium foil

[pushing-robot]

It's a losing battle, unfortunately. We can't remember one simple 2048-bit private key, we emit all varieties of radiation, we leave a literal trail of identifiable chemical signatures, we're susceptible to an enormous variety of attacks, have only a vague notion of what's going on around us (or, for that matter, inside us), have predictable needs and habits, share important details of our lives with others, and last but not least, are frequently willing to trade our privacy for a little convenience or money.

In short: we're loud and messy, and trying to make a human invisible to the technology of today and tomorrow is ultimately futile. It's like DRM; the most you can do is make it slightly harder and impose laws declaring the water should stay in the sieve.

Hopefully we'll wise up someday and stop caring about the pointless minutiae of each others' lives, and decide that as long as technological advance means we're heading for a panopticon anyway, it needs to be owned by all the people.

Not holding my breath, though.