Physicists have learned to see people through walls using WiFi – RIA Novosti

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© Photo: MIT CSAIL

© Photo: MIT CSAIL

MOSCOW, October 29 – RIA Novosti. Physicists at MIT have modified the work of conventional WiFi-transmitters so that they can now use to see people through walls, and even measure their pulse, what they talked on the university site.

How to write scientists working on the creation of such analogies “x-ray vision” of comic books, they began in 2013, when they managed to create a special algorithm for the analysis of the radio signal in the WiFi-receiver allows to determine that someone is standing or moving through the wall from variations in its power and other parameters.

In his new work, which will be presented at a scientific conference SIGGRAPH Japanese Kobe in early November this year, the scientists told about the enhanced version of this technology that allows literally see who is behind wall, watch out for the fact that he wrote by hand and even to measure the pulse of the person.

The technology works is quite simple – a specially modified transmitter WiFi “bombarding” the wall. Some of them generated by waves reflected from people and objects behind the wall, and falls back to the nearby signal receiver. These waves are analyzed using a special algorithm, “coached” on silhouettes recognition, similar in shape to the human body or body parts.

© Photo: Jacobs School of Engineering, UC San Diego

The secret of its success is that the program does not look at one, but several “Frame”, which allows it to quickly find a person in cases where each of them there is only a part of the body.

Further improvement of the algorithm allowed the scientists to achieve amazing things – for example, the program is now able to determine the weight and height human, allowing her a 90% chance to determine who is behind the wall. This ability, the scientists suggest, may be interested in the security services and law enforcement agencies.

In addition, the algorithm is able to calculate your heart rate and track the movements of people located outside the walls. This feature of the program, according to Fadel Adib and Dean kataba, the creators of this WiFi- “rentgenovizora”, you can use it to continuously monitor the health of elderly people living alone and automatically call an ambulance if they fell and did not move.

And finally, such a thing can be used for entertainment as a more reliable and more versatile replacement for Kinect and other similar manipulators, allow you to control the character’s movement in computer games using body movements.