Smart technology sees through walls to track and identify people

JASON DORFMAN/MIT CSAI

#AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #MIT #Robotics

A group of researchers and students at MIT have developed an intelligent radar-like technology that makes it possible to see through walls to track people as they move around, a development that could prove useful for monitoring the elderly or sick as well as for other applications — but that also raises privacy concerns.

Tests show that the technology, known as RF-Pose, can reveal whether someone is walking, sitting, standing or even waving — and can identify individuals from a known group with a success rate of 83 percent. Its developers say it could prove useful for law enforcement, search and rescue, and — perhaps most important — health care.

“We’ve seen that monitoring patients’ walking speed and ability to do basic activities on their own gives healthcare providers a window into their lives that they didn’t have before, which could be meaningful for a whole range of diseases,” Dina Katabi, a computer scientist at MIT and leader of the group, said in a statement.

She and her colleagues presented new research about the technology last month at a computer vision conference in Salt Lake City.

Katabi said doctors might use the technology to keep tabs on someone with Parkinson’s disease by watching for changes in gait that might indicate a looming problem. Or people might use it to monitor an elderly relative — for example, to receive an instant alert if he or she falls.

The technology, which uses artificial intelligence to interpret radio wave data, grows out of earlier work by the same group. Previous versions of the technology could detect a person’s silhouette behind a wall, but Katabi said this is the first time it’s been possible to closely track and identify people.

The heart of RF-Pose is a laptop-sized radio transmitter. The radio waves it beams out pass through walls but is reflected by human bodies because of their high water content. Computer algorithms analyze the reflected waves, homing in on the head, hands, feet and other key body parts to produce moving stick figures on a screen.

Katabi and her team trained RF-Pose by giving it photographs of people as well as the crude images created by the reflected radio waves. Eventually, RF-Posed learned to produce a stick figure whenever its radio signals indicated the presence of a person.

What do other experts make of the new technology? Ginés Hidalgo, a research associate at the Robotics Institute of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, told NBC News MACH in an email that it was of limited use at this point because the radio signals it uses are unable to pass through thick walls.

"It could become a breakthrough" if that limitation can be addressed, said Hidalgo, who was not involved in the project.

But Hidalgo said the technology also raises privacy concerns. "If a normal camera is recording me, it means I am able to see the camera, too," he said in the email. "If this camera can be hidden behind or even inside an object, I would never be able to know when I am being monitored."

Katabi acknowledged such concerns. “Particularly in the current climate, this is an important question,” she told the news outlet Motherboard.“We have developed mechanisms to block the use of the technology, and it anonymizes and encrypts the data."

The researchers are working to test RF-Pose with the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research and hope eventually to market a commercial version of the technology.

by Kate Baggaley / Jul.08.2018

Coping With Moods: The Challenge of the Turbulent Mind

#Mood #Impulses #selfregulate #selfsoothe #Triple5LightTherapy #BlackMaleTherapist #Psychotherapy The power of moods and impulses can be overwhelming, but we can learn to self-regulate and self-soothe through awareness practices like meditation and mindfulness. By developing a healthy dialogue with our emotional nature, we can access deeper parts of ourselves and become more resilient in the face of stress and pressure. Rather than being swept away by our ever-shifting moods, we can learn to pause and reflect before acting. by Gillian McCann, Ph.D., and Gitte Bechsgaard, RP

The Price of Perfection

#Perfection #CopingStrategies #Mindfulness #AllorNothingThinking #Catastrophizing, Broadly speaking, perfectionism is a personality style where people set exceptionally high standards for themselves in order to achieve perfection. However, the motive behind perfectionism is not the achievement of perfection, but rather, the avoidance of failure. More simply speaking, perfectionism is really a type of anxiety. Anxiety is adaptive and evolutionarily speaking, protects us from danger. In cavemen days, anxiety helped our ancestors flee from predators. However, in modern days, rarely do we need to flee from predators. Consequently, maladaptive anxiety is increasingly common and acts as a faulty alarm system- alerting us to danger as if there were a predator chasing us when actually we are not in real danger. In regards to perfectionism, those with this type of anxiety are so afraid to fail, they go to great lengths to avoid the possibility of failure. Underneath, an alarm system is g...

Psychologists Have Created A League Table Of Scary And Revolting Animals Phobias

#Psychology #MentalHealth #Phobias #Animalphobias #Spider #Snake #Dog You may be best advised not to read this article late at night or before you eat. Psychologists at the National Institute of Mental Health and Charles University in the Czech Republic have surveyed a large sample of non-clinical volunteers to gauge their reaction to 24 creatures that are commonly the source of specific animals phobias. The results, published in the British Journal of Psychology, contribute to our understanding of animal phobias and could prove incredibly useful to horror writers. Among the key findings is that spiders were unique in being both intensely fear- and disgust-inducing in equal measure. The researchers said this may be due to their mix of disgusting properties – including their “quirky ‘too-many-legs’ body plan” – combined with the fact they are “…omnipresent in our homes, often lurking in the hidden dark places and capable of fast unpredictable movement.” In other words, the intense ...

Kate Bush's "50 Words for Snow"

#50WordsforSnow #KateBush #RunningUpThatHill From up on that hill, perhaps wearing a capelet over a flowy Victorian gown, Kate Bush has been regarded as a spirit saint of fearless individuality by a generation of musicians such as Björk and Tori Amos as well as younger mystics-in-training such as Florence Welch, Leslie Feist and Bat for Lashes. All that adoration in the ether must’ve stirred the reclusive British singer-songwriter to create not just one album this year — “Director’s Cut,” a reinterpretation of songs from “The Sensual World” and “The Red Shoes” — but also a second one, “50 Words for Snow,” an art-song cycle that veers from delicate to blustery but always with a sheen of elegance. Bush grounds her songs in the permafrost of winter, with her piano work sounding like the first stirrings after a cold snap. “Among Angels” could be the soundtrack for plants stretching toward the new spring sun, but as much as it’s connected to the natural world, the s...

Triple5Light Therapy

Search This Blog