WiFi signals can measure heart rate

No clunky wearables? No chest strap on the treadmill? Heart rate and respiration? Monitors everyone in the house simultaneously 24/7 on a cheap rpi? I hope this doesn't take years to come to market because this seems incredibly useful.

Could also see the value of this for caregiving. I caretake for my grandmother, and even something as simple as keeping airtags on her keys has been a challenge. It would be impossible for her to consistently wear some wearable health device / life alert / etc. passive health monitoring that’s not intrusive would be amazing.

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 are positive sci-fi use cases, but ONLY IF the data and automation are entirely under control of the human subjects, e.g. self-hosted home server, local GPUs, local LLM, offline voice recognition, private 3D imaging of home and human, etc.

WiFi RSSI hacks (WiSee (2013),)

Linksys Aware (-2024): https://www.google.com/search?q=Linksys+Aware

From this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45129817 :

> 802.11bf

802.11bf: https://www.google.com/search?q=802.11bf

"Whole-home gesture recognition using wireless signals" (2013) https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/2500423.2500436 .. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=1386163076039493879...

From https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38246722 re: a stylus with accelerometer with many degrees of freedom and inertial measurement:

> /? wireless gesture recognition RSSI:

> /? wireless gesture recognition RSSI site:github.com

> Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing: https://github.com/Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing

> 3D Scanning > Technology, Applications [...]

I feel this technology would creep people out so much that anyone in the wifi space would be actively hostile towards these things. Maybe they'll lock it behind patents? I doubt governments would want this to become common knowledge either.

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

Sensing is (sadly) already part of Wi-Fi 7. If you have a recent Intel, AMD or Qualcomm device from the past few years, it's likely physically capable of detecting human presence and/or activity (e.g. breathing rate, keystrokes, hand gestures). It can also be done with $20 ESP32 devices + OSS firmware. The open questions are on custody and legal usage of CSI measurements, not their existence.

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

when I'm old and going to die, "in my sleep" would be top of the list of ways I would want to go, (during sex is likely not going to be an option)

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

May we all be so lucky but "old" is relative in this case. An acquaintance did just that... in his 50's :/

But think of how much money they can make by selling your health data to insurance companies!

Yet another tool for our surveillance capitalism overlords to figure out when people are having sex.

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.

If it’s during sex, would you want your sex partner to also die at the same time? Seems like it would be a troubling experience for the other person.

Alexa: "I sounds like you're having sex. Would you like me to play Vivaldi's Concerto Grosso in D minor on Spotify and schedule a breakfast delivery through GrubHub?"

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

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.

I’m an EMT, so not the deepest level of knowledge, but certain progressive things that will kill you (such as sepsis) would show noticeable trending in basic vitals like heart rate and respiratory rate. And sepsis is also common in geriatrics (catheter / surgery / G tube -> infection -> sepsis)

If you have control of your data, then you can delegate to doctors, EMT or other agents.

I want my doctor as agent to delegate to other specialists without consulting me. Most of the time it isn't needed but I don't want to be bothered for 'just double checking this is nothing' which should happen at times.

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

IDK what the error rate of gestural recognition with Wifi is. FWIU the market for e.g. the Magic Leap gestural peripheral just wasn't there. That paper says 2013.

Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing#gesture-recognition: https://github.com/Marsrocky/Awesome-WiFi-CSI-Sensing#gestur... :

> "Real-time Cross-Domain Gesture and User Identification via COTS WiFi" (2025)

> "One is Enough: Enabling One-shot Device-free Gesture Recognition with COTS WiFi" (2024) https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/10621091 .. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cites=5141488558554953622...

When you say, "I want", you need initial data control to give that instruction.

You can delegate to your doctor the right to delegate to other specialists without consulting you.

Other humans can delegate to the agents of their choice.

This is why the first step is for you to have control of your data, then you can specify/revoke who-does-what with it.