5 May 2015 – The past few weeks we have seen a tsunami of health-tracking developments, much of it discussed at the RSA Conference in San Francisco which we recently attended. Coolest bit at RSA this year: it opened with everyone sitting in the dark. Literally. Amit Yoran, the new president of RSA Security, began his opening keynote while standing on a dark stage. “My stumbling around in the dark is a pretty good metaphor for anyone who’s trying to protect networks today,” Yoran said, describing how the industry has failed to deliver on its promises. “2014 was yet another reminder that we’re losing the contest. We can neither secure nor trust the pervasive complex, and worse, end-point participants in any large or distributed committing environment”.
The RSA conference emphasized the obvious: in the digital world in which we now live, information is the most highly valued commodity. Safeguarding that information, therefore, has become a top priority. And the “experts” are failing miserably.
The big event this month was the Apple Watch with its data repository for health-tracking software, carving out what Tim Cook hopes to be “the” wearable devise for folks to monitor themselves. Called “HealthKit”, the Apple software framework can collect data from any health device or app, and share it with electronic health record software used by doctors and hospitals. One thing noted at RSA: by encouraging patients to be more proactive about their health care, and by allowing them to control which data they share with caregivers, the arrangement may improve compliance with federal directives on the use of electronic health record software.
Of a creepier note was the face-reading software, Affdex, from the artificial intelligence startup Affectiva, which can read your emotional reactions in real time. It is being used in the movie industry to analyze audience reactions to films. Should your mouth turn down a second too long or your eyes squeeze shut in fright, the plot will speed along. But if they grow large and hold your interest, the program will draw out the suspense. Quoting Julian McCrea, founder of the London-based studio Portal Entertainment: “Yes, the killing is going to happen, but whether you want to be kept in the tension depends on you”.
We’ve written about Affectiva before. It was a tech startup out of MIT Media Lab in 2009. It gained attention during the 2012 Presidential election when it was used to track a sample of voters during a debate.
With $20 million in venture funding, the company has so far worked closely with a few partners to test its commercial applications. Last week it was announced that Affectiva will invite developers to experiment with a 45-day free test and then license its tools. You remember Intel inside? They envisions “Affectiva-embedded” technology, saying, “It’ll sit on your phone, in your car, in your fridge. It will sense your emotions and adapt seamlessly without being in your face.”
Creepy but cool. In a way. It’s original purpose was to help children with autism. It builds detailed models of the face, taking into account the crinkle of the skin around the eye when you smile or the dip in the corner of your bottom lip when you frown. The software has logged 11 billion of these data points, taken from 2.8 million faces in 75 countries. The software relies on a so-called Facial Action Coding System, a taxonomy of 46 human facial movements that can be combined in different arrays to identify and label emotions. When it was developed in the late 1970s, humans scored emotional states manually by watching the movement of facial muscles. The technology has become robust enough to be reliably useful.
“HA! Child’s play!” say the folks behind Katabi Lab. Well, they didn’t really, but they might. Katabi Lab is part of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. What they have developed is a radar-like system that fits inside a Wi-Fi box that can record health data and keep tabs on your mood – without you even noticing. Without you being aware of it, an undercover system discreetly records your breathing and heartbeat. Called Vital-Radio, the system needs no sensors attached to the body, yet is nearly as accurate as conventional methods. Its measurements are wireless and even work through walls, so can keep tabs on your vital signs as you watch TV in the lounge or read or sleep in the bedroom. The team behind it believe it could be used to monitor and improve patient health in hospitals and at home.
And therein lie the coup: breathing and heart rate can be monitored without having things on a patient’s body. But the system could have a more surprising application: inferring our emotional state. What’s more, it could be built into a home Wi-Fi router, making it a hub not just for internet connections but also for collecting health data. Vital-Radio works like a bit like radar: it transmits using a part of the radio spectrum similar to that used for Wi-Fi, then watches the reflected signals for imprints that indicate life. It also measures how long it takes the reflected wave to return – its “time of flight”. Each object in the vicinity, people included, will reflect the signals with a slightly different flight time depending on distance from the antenna.
From a New Scientist article:
The system then analyses the signals for the telltale signs that they bounced off a human – usually modulations that indicate movement. The rising and falling of our chest creates a distinct signature, and even the pulse in our neck, imperceptible to the eye, can be seen in the reflected signals. Although the obvious applications lie in remote health monitoring, the physiological signals the system picks up often betray something that computer scientists are increasingly interested in – our emotions. Call centres already use software to “read” how callers feel from their tone of voice, helping their workers make decisions. Vital-Radio could do a similar thing for the technology we interact with, all without needing us to don any extra gadgets.
A modified Wi-Fi router incorporating the system might tell our laptop that the movie we’re watching is calming us down, prompting the laptop to hold off displaying alerts, except for truly urgent matters. Smart lighting or music systems could change their hue or the music they play to match or moderate our mood.
The group is honing the system to the point where it can monitor a fetus’s heartbeat inside its mother. It may one day even be able to monitor the heartbeat in detail, acquiring data comparable to an electrocardiogram without the need for a hospital visit.
But the biggest challenge for systems like Vital-Radio is how to deal accurately with the fact that people don’t sit still. A heartbeat is 1 millimetre or smaller. Any random body motion could be much larger than the signal you want to capture. For this reason, Vital-Radio doesn’t try to monitor a person’s heart and breath rate while they wander about. But the technology it relies on can be used to track you as you move around the house, for instance. It can also track specific gestures and body language. A home with the system installed and connected to the lighting system would, for example, let residents control lights with a wave of their arm, much like using a Kinect can.
There’s going to be a lot of applications. Not just in home but hospitals too. If the technical problem is solved, then the first hit will be in routine health monitoring.
