Put your tin-foil hats on! Wi-Fi can be used to guesstimate number of people hidden in a room Wireless network gear can be used to estimate the number of people hidden behind walls, according to fresh research out of America. Saandeep Depatla, a PhD student, and Yasamin Mostofi, a professor of electrical and computer engineering, both at the University of California, Santa Barbara, were able to figure out more or less …
It’ll be a while before something like this is practical, but there are obvious areas where it would be useful.
I can't think of any areas where this would be more useful than other existing approaches. In particular, the example of bodies in a building shows a lack of understanding of how the technique works: you can't just point a wifi beam at something, you need a baseline.
Looking at some of my colleagues you may be right. But I'm also sure not many have big animals in a room, albeit it's true some dogs are big enough - yet being biped or quadruped may change how the beam is intercepted.
Cats. on the other hand, I'm sure are small enough to merge with the noise especially when they sleep, and anyway their whiskers would warn them.
"It is a fairly gross assumption that the only "bodies" in a room are human."
What else would they be? If this is being touted as a way to count how many customers are in places like shops and cafes, there are unlikely to be any other large animals moving around inside. The number of guide dogs will be well within the normal margin of error, and outside some kind of Jumanji situation what other possibilities are there?
Shouldn't that be 'how many enemies and civilians'? All you're getting is a total, to help you decide if your surgical strike is worth the cost of a smart missile. The decisions on whether killing all the civilians just to kill your enemies is either moral or will be worth the negative publicity are entirely separate.
I might have built a synthetic aperture radar based on WiFi, for detecting "moose/elk" passing across the forested european border to a very large autocratic regime, or vice-versa
Now I've recently seen similar devices along some of the wilder roads in the Alps, checking for deer & wild-boar and flashing signs at cars and beaming awful noises at the wildlife. Only seen one 'tripped' but there were no heffalumps in sight.
Even houses with meter thick stone walls typically don't have meter thick stone interior walls. They were testing from an adjoining room, not outside the structure - and they were doing it through not just wood but also plaster and concrete walls. I'm sure their concrete walls weren't a meter thick, but still.
You have to remember that mobile phone masts also double as a mini radar station
the analysis of GSM disturbances allegedly detected stealth aircraft, pre Bosnia
some search terms "GSM opportunistic emitter bistatic multistatic radar" . quite a bit of (simple) MATLAB signal processing can extract a lot of info from any available transmitter, parasitically
I've no real idea what the military call them, from the 'humanitarian' radar side we also used them for avalanche/mudslide and volcanic eruption prediction. Hopefully the new UK Space Radar sat can also do some of that
I seriously doubt inflatable people would interfere much with the signal - unless you inflate them with some kind of liquid instead of a gas, at which point this becomes too kinky even for me, and that's without going into structural issues with an object that was not meant to support the weight of a liquid inside itself...
I don't know about you, but I don't actually spend a whole lot of time walking casually in a room. And this doesn't work at all if your sat down.
I hope this paper wasn't responsible for his PhD. It doesn't exactly move the state of the art forward does it? It's exactly the same transit method as people have been using to detect exo planets for two decades. In fact you can do it without wifi anyway - look at a window and people passing will reduce the transmission from the ceiling lights.
The only time I can think where this might work accurately is during a particularly vigorous earthquake.
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