One day, WiFi might even be usable as a method for making a reliable network connection
this post was submitted on 04 Sep 2025
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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.
Oh, the person selling you medical or life insurance is gonna love this..
The Paper: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/11096342/metrics#metrics
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.
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?
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 to collect the ESP-HR-CSI Dataset (left site) and the one that other researchers used to collect the E-Health Dataset (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 in
B. 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.
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.
Isn't this no different then a sonogram
Inb4 the cops starts doing nonconsensual "polygraph tests" using wifi
Those 5G Conspiracy Theorists probably feel vindicated after reading this lol
https://wballiance.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/WBA-Wi-Fi-Sensing-paper.pdf
Comcast knows when you masturbate.
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.
Insurance companies...sorry you're denied for being a health risk....we can see from your home internet that you're an unhealthy person
Remember kids, you can buy your own home fiber router! Don't live with someone else's equipment between you and the internet.
This tech scares the hell out of me.
Great if we can make MRI quality imaging eventually available, but being able to monitor where people are in their homes remotely and their health status in our world is fucking dangerous.
In a world where private health care is the norm, yes. It’s scary.
In a world where Public health care is the main provider of health it isn’t.
What?
Yeah I'm with you.
"Using this technological advancement to improve health care is good"
"Not in countries where health care is publicly run"
"What" is the correct response here.
Edited for better comprehension. I didn’t have my coffee, sorry
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?
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.
Wear an aluminum foil vest and a Faraday suit. Burn your computer after reading, I've said too much....
Turns out the tinfoil hat gang was right the whole time.
Innocuous radio signals are one thing but if my apartment is inundated with radio waves that can literally be used to track my movements and monitor my heartbeat, being forced to allow this is a perverse and sickening invasion of privacy.
If you think the lack of privacy is bad now, just wait till they use this to target done strikes. We're all in for super fun times.
Yes, 20 people at a government agency are watching you watch Netflix and taking a shit.
the problem is that you don't need 20 people for this kind of thing. you can just kinda passively slurp the data up from every router and throw it into a machine learning model to be used by cops or sold to advertisers. you don't need a human in the loop anywhere and it's essentially impossible to opt out of
Own the network. Run OSS.
That's about it.
"Howdy neighbour. Your wireless modem/router combo is mine now. Thxkbye"
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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.
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?
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.
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