Damn. “TikTok would like to access WiFi”
We need new permissions for this shit. WiFi can do presence detection and now heart rate? What next? Eye tracking?
WiFi signals can measure heart rate—no wearables needed
Submitted 3 weeks ago by RegularJoe@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://news.ucsc.edu/2025/09/pulse-fi-wifi-heart-rate/
Comments
paraphrand@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’m pretty sure applications can only send and receive data, with the finer details being handled by the OS.
But yes, there should be a specific permission to access biometric information.
paraphrand@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That makes sense. I assume these exotic ability’s require precise control of the radios. So, for now, until an API made, we should be safe.
SeductiveTortoise@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
Suddenly your new dishwasher sends your health protocols to your doc. The fancy toilet helped with a consistency analysis and your smart lamps add a sleeping protocol.
Semi_Hemi_Demigod@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Maybe not eye tracking, but probably head tracking.
brbposting@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Apps watch how we move/rotate devices to understand whether we’re walking, resting, lying down, etc., I assume? (The most popular apps I mean with large data teams)
Wish that stuff could be turned off unless it was e.g. a game that made legitimate use of the accelerometer.
Amir@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Android throttles the hell out of WiFi requests since (I think) Android 9. You need to manually allow WiFi request spamming in developer options to let apps do something like determining location from it.
webjukebox@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think it can also detect our neural frequencies, aka ‘read our minds’. That’s why we see ads for things we thought about but never even searched for.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
WiFi can also do pretty precise location. Bluetooth/BLE even more precise (inches or less)
yucandu@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I think they mean without a phone. A 2.4ghz radio can be used as a presence detection radar.
panda_abyss@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where perks are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
krunklom@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Real question: how do you stop this?
I don’t use wifi at all in my home but I live in an apartment and all my neighbours obviously do.
How in the hell do I stop this from getting into my home?
TwoDogsFighting@lemmy.ml 3 weeks ago
Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right through whole time.
Manifish_Destiny@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Own the network. Run OSS.
That’s about it.
tekato@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Your neighbors WIFI signals are too weak to matter in this case. Even if they were strong enough, this is a receiver-transmitter setup, so it would still be impossible to do unless you connect to their network. Even then, they’d have to assume you’re the only person present between the transmitter and the receiver.
Presence detection through WIFI was already garbage enough, this one is plain unusable.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Wear an aluminum foil vest and a Faraday suit. Burn your computer after reading, I’ve said too much…
alecbowles@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
In a world where private health care is the norm, yes. In a country with Public health care is the main provider of health it isn’t.
PlexSheep@infosec.pub 2 weeks ago
It has nothing to do with that. This is about privacy and data security.
WhyJiffie@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
oh yes it still is
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Insurance companies…sorry you’re denied for being a health risk…we can see from your home internet that you’re an unhealthy person
hansolo@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
Remember kids, you can buy your own home fiber router! Don’t live with someone else’s equipment between you and the internet.
CallMeMrFlipper@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Care to explain what you mean? Are you saying you can run fiber in your house? Doesn’t that still require some form of equipment from an ISP to actually go out to the internet?
Mr_Dr_Oink@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Wifi sognals can read my heart rate, and be ised to track me around my house. But I still can’t get a signal in my room one floor up from the router.
GreenShimada@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
This is the key point - these have to be clear signals in the same room.
yaroto98@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Wow, all that with an esp32. No fancy hardware needed.
Mora@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
Which means we can have that data in Home Assistant sooner or later🤔
Dalraz@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
This is really cool and will be useful. My second thought was oh great now my smart TV can see how excited I am watching their injected ads and how many people saw it too. One of the many reasons to never connect modern TVs to the Internet.
Grainne@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 weeks ago
The next headline will be “wifi connecting to internet-no modem needed”
DeathByBigSad@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Inb4 the cops starts doing nonconsensual “polygraph tests” using wifi
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
blarth@thelemmy.club 3 weeks ago
wballiance.com/…/WBA-Wi-Fi-Sensing-paper.pdf
Comcast knows when you masturbate.
jaemo@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
I rather think they will be let down, given we’re on wifi 7, not 5G, and also no injected nanites were involved.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
The Paper: ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/…/metrics#m…
This is very cool and useful, but at the same time very concerning. While I see a lot of good use cases for this ranging from hospitals to stress recognition in animals I Am also quite scared, that big corporations will use this to spy on us. Luckily currently it is only possible to measure the pulse at about 3m, but it should be possible to increase the range. It may fall short when multiple persons are in detection range, but as far as I have read from the paper they did not test this.
GamingChairModel@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Article is paywalled for me.
Does it describe the methodology of how they use the transmitter and receiver?
What specifically are they transmitting? Is it actually wifi signals within the 802.11 protocols, or is “wifi” just shorthand for emitting radio waves in the same spectrum bands as wifi?
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Yeah sadly it is paywalled, but I have been lucky enough to get access to it through my university.
Heres what I found regarding your question in the article:
Fig 1 illustrates Pulse-Fi’s system architecture which consists of three main components: data collection using commodity Wi-Fi devices, a CSI signal processing pipeline, and a custom lightweight Long Short Term Memory neural network for heart rate estimation.
Fig 1:
And this is the Setup they used (left site) and the one that other researchers used (right side):
The parts on how they collected the data:
A. ESP-HR-CSI Dataset
We collected the ESP-HR-CSI dataset from seven participants (5 male, 2 female) in a room of a public indoor library. It was collected using two ESP32 devices, one as the transmitter and the other as the receiver. The sampling rate is 80 Hz, with a 20 MHz bandwidth with 64 subcarriers positioned at different distances. Each participant was measured at distances of 1,2 and 3 m for 5 minutes each. The participants sat in a chair between the devices and wore a pulse oximeter on their finger to collect ground-truth information as seen inB. E-Health Dataset
The E-Health dataset [20] contains CSI collected from 118 participants (88 men, 30 women) in a controlled indoor environment measuring 3 m×4 m (Fig 4). The setup consists of a router set in the 5 GHz band at 80 MHz bandwidth as a transmitter, a laptop as receiver and a single-antenna Raspberry Pi 4B with NEXMON firmware for CSI data collection (234 subcarriers). Participants wore a Samsung Galaxy Watch 4 for the ground truth.Each participant performed 17 standardized positions or activities, with each position held for 60 seconds.
To me it sounds like, that they really just used standard WIFI to collect the data (this is especially true for the E-Health Dataset), since all the processing gets done on the Raspberry Pi.
zaphod@sopuli.xyz 3 weeks ago
All these Wifi for tracking people methods use the channel state information (CSI) that is used to help decode the transmitted data. CSI is obtained from pilot signals that are transmitted as part of a regular transmission. This is done in basically all digital communication standards, so you could do this not just with Wifi but also with 4G or 5G or older mobile communication standards. This is all not very surprising, there is a lot of research in contactless radio based heart rate monitoring, they usually build on radar systems not communication systems though. The buzzword for 6G for all this is joint communication and sensing.
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Sure, everyone is getting spied on by everyone because everyone is so damned important to everyone.
heroname@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
Let’s try again: someone is getting spied on by someone because someone is so damned important to someone. And there’s a lot of someones.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Health data is extremely valuable. You can use it to serve more personalised ads or even use it to, as example, define prices for health insurance. When you combine it with lots of other data it becomes even more valuable. Also never forget, big corporations track literally everything. Why not add your heart rate.
misteloct@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
Not everyone, just Americans and other surveillance states.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
How much longer until I can be like “Hey, Google; scan the area for lifeforms?”
Rozz@lemmy.sdf.org 3 weeks ago
0 days
Kolanaki@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
robo voice: There are
352hot, single women in your area.
Networkcathode@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
“Sure, turning on all downstairs lights”
janus2@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
hakunawazo@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
You need some redshirts with you, in case of danger.
dohpaz42@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
And I guarantee some organization will figure out how to use this for some police state bullshit.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
That’s already the original use case. Cardiac signature biometrics, can install in a doorway and do identity verification and track/monitor every individual that passes through the threshold
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
People do not have that distinct cardiac ECG profiles, and it would be wrong after one coffee.
Holy shit the US state paranoia in the sub. Buy more guns.
Networkcathode@piefed.social 3 weeks ago
“Sure, turning on all downstairs lights…”
inconel@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Capitalism asks whether you are the kind of person harvesting people’s health info without concent or selling aluminum mesh underwear with fearmongering campaign. No other choices.
roguetrick@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Cool tech but I question it’s usefulness. They focus on clinical in their language but anybody who’s on telemetry orders needs waveforms not beats per minute. I care if they’re suddenly in afib, not that they’re a little tachy after getting up to go to the bathroom.
salty_chief@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Well some darker entities probably would appreciate access to this tech. In order to confirm mission complete if you smell what I am cooking.
yucandu@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
They mentioned apnea.
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
2026: Major grocers found using customer heart rate to personalise prices - higher the pulse, higher the price
sturger@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I’ve heard of similar, but how exactly does this work? Does it say $0.99 on the shelf and the receipt winds up being $1.50?
JoshuaFalken@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
I was referencing digital price labels that retailers are installing.
This technology is being touted by the companies putting them in place to be a cost saving measure as staff no longer need to print new labels and manually replace them for products on the shelf. This is true in that it is a benefit of digital labelling, however there are many other usage options that could be implemented after installation.
- alter prices around lunch hour for ready meals and snacks at retailers in walking distance to secondary schools
- automatic increases for products being purchased more rapidly than historical averages to capitalize on a yet unknown trend
- increases simply as stock begins running low
Imagine in a few years when this technology is combined with network snooping of phone identification, loyalty rewards card purchase histories, and automatic buying of customer information from data brokers, all to create a profile that predicts when a person would be likely to be menstruating and the moment they walk in the store, the hygienic products they buy every month raise in price by 30%.
It’s a bleak future I’m afraid.
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
So how long before our phones can measure heart rate from your pocket, or being held in your hand?
potoo22@programming.dev 3 weeks ago
They already can by putting your finger on the camera and lighting up your finger with the led light. Then it detects the rhythmic changes picked up by the camera… At least 10+ years ago. It was a good novelty feature, but turns out, for most healthy people, checking your heart rate gets old after a few runs.
sturger@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
I saw demos online where they could also determine heart rate through video. The example I saw was a video of a newborn’s face.
frongt@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
It’s probably possible right now.
Kraven_the_Hunter@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 weeks ago
So the tricorder in Star Trek was just a fancy, battery powered wifi hotspot??
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Yeah but it ran on Linux.
theunknownmuncher@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
3 letter agencies have already been using this for cardiac signature identity verification and tracking for a long while
sirspate@lemmy.ca 3 weeks ago
Oh, the person selling you medical or life insurance is gonna love this…
jawa22@lemmy.blahaj.zone 3 weeks ago
I am not surprised. Passive WiFi was introduced nearly a decade ago, so it makes sense that measurement systems based on WiFi have come a long way since. It’s frightening, honestly.
Arcane2077@sh.itjust.works 3 weeks ago
If it could do that this whole time why did I invest a bunch of money and a whole lot more time in fancy mmWave presence sensors?? 🥲
Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Is this good? I can’t tell if it’ll just be used as one more invasive information gathering data points for Amazon and google
Melvin_Ferd@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Isn’t this no different then a sonogram
Ileftreddit@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Is this good? I can’t help but think it’s just another datapoint for google to scrape
Agent641@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
One day, WiFi might even be usable as a method for making a reliable network connection
Tlf@feddit.org 3 weeks ago
Just imagine how much humanity could benefit if sharing and accessing knowledge was freely available for almost anyone
squaresinger@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The problem is not sharing and accessing, but generating. If we had a system where people would be paid for generating knowledge, then they wouldn’t have to charge for accessing knowledge.
That’s why a lot more research should be paid for by the government. In exchange, government-funded research would be excluded from having patents and/or copyright.
jimmy90@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
is it not?
YiddishMcSquidish@lemmy.today 3 weeks ago
One can dream. For now though it’s the one radio my phone doesn’t use. Mobile network tunneling through Bluetooth baby! My atrial fibrillation when remain between me and my meth dealer! Shout out to Craig!