6 ms·

Smart speaker system uses white noise to monitor infants' breathing

54 points by dnetesn 7y ago

TeMPOraL 7y ago
Yup. So another excuse for the "smart speaker"[0] to be always listening and always transmitting data. And honestly, I'm not against a microphone that's always on. But I am against a microphone that sends what it hears to the cloud, to be owned, stored and processed by some third parties in unknown ways. Ambient computing is a very fine concept on its own - but what it needs is to be pried out from the hands of commercial entities driving it. It should be implemented in such a way that the user owns the data, storage of that data is entirely decoupled from the software that's being run on it and from the cloud that brings the two together. That is, I should be able to choose software that operates on a data I own, in a place I want it to, and that software should not exfiltrate that data. I guess it won't happen without a long legal fight that's still ahead of us. But until then, there's no way in hell I'm going to let such a device be anywhere near my kid. -- [0] - It's funny how the name emphasizes the speaker aspect, whereas the core competency of such devices is the microphone.
- rtkwe 7y ago
  I'm not sure where you're getting that this requires transmitting all the microphone data to the cloud. All of this could in theory be done on the device without cloud processing at all.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    It could be, but it won't. The article mentions mainstream "smart speakers", none of which does it, and whose producers have every incentive to not do it.
    - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
      Yet the photos from the article clearly show it running on a laptop.
      - swsieber 7y ago
        > To make things easy for new parents, the team made a system that could run on a smart speaker that replicates the hardware in an Amazon Echo. > "Smart speakers are becoming more and more prevalent, and these devices already have the ability to play white noise," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the director of the UW computing for health group. "If we could use this white noise feature as a contactless way to monitor infants' hand and leg movements, breathing and crying, then the smart speaker becomes a device that can do it all, which is really exciting." They are clearly aiming to get this running on smart speakers.
- edejong 7y ago
  I came to the comments just to voice a similar concern. We need to take ownership of our data, whether it is biometric, environmental or social. And once we have established this for ourselves, we should make it as accessible as the commercial offerings. This should be the new open source movement. Projects like OpenHAB and homebrew sensor networks with low power open source schematics and drivers. Hey, we are already heading there. It’s just the masses that will stay ignorant for a decade.
imglorp 7y ago
Relevant to SIDS tech: https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/22/qualcomm-tricorder-x-prize-is-another-poorly-conceived-contest/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/22/qualcomm-tricorder-x-pri...
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
cushychicken 7y ago
> "We start out by transmitting a random white noise signal. But we are generating this random signal, so we know exactly what the randomness is," said first author Anran Wang, a doctoral student in the Allen School. "That signal goes out and reflects off the baby. Then the smart speaker's microphones get a random signal back. Because we know the original signal, we can cancel out any randomness from that and then we're left with only information about the motion from the baby." Reading between the lines of this, it sounds like these folks found another clever use for adaptive filtering. I wonder how well this plays along with whatever adaptive filtering is already going on inside an Amazon Echo? As I've learned more about the guts of voice speakers' signal processing, I've come to realize that adaptive filtering plays a huge part in making modern acoustics and telecom possible. It's a super cool subset of signal processing if you're interested in that sort of thing. https://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/ug/overview-of-adaptive-filters-and-applications.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/ug/overview-of-adaptive-f...
- aidenn0 7y ago
  It seems like the equivalent of a DSSS radar, but with sonar.
  - cushychicken 7y ago
    Not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. I don't understand much of how radar works, but my understanding at a really basic level is that you're sending out some known modulated signal and then extracting some information from the magnitude and delay of that returned signal. In that case, this is the same idea, but in the adaptive filtering case, it's actually the errors in the received modulated signal that you care about, because the error contains all the signals you didn't originally transmit - things like room sounds, or audio multipath. I will admit, however, that I don't know enough about radar to know that we're not talking past one another. XD
rootusrootus 7y ago
Another way to feed your paranoia as a new parent. There are other monitors already which purport to monitor infants breathing, and I haven't met anyone yet who used them who recommends them. Inevitably they give false positives, and it's hell on your nerves. After a while you learn to just ignore them so you don't go insane. Then you take out the monitor because what's the point.
- ledauphin 7y ago
  This is the internet, though, so people like me will always exist. We bought a fairly cheap wearable monitor early on, and it works. Both in the sense that it has given us a couple of false positives when it got out of position, and in the more important sense that it has only done so a handful of times and the rest of the time I sleep much more soundly because I know it would go off if our child stopped breathing. Honestly, this is not a truly hard problem to solve, and I'm kind of amazed that the APA hasn't figured that out yet. On the other hand, obviously the effect on different parents may vary.
  - whatshisface 7y ago
    What use is it to know when your child stops breathing? Is there anything you can do about it?
    - goodcanadian 7y ago
      CPR, artificial respiration, call an ambulance . . .
      - catalogia 7y ago
        I wonder what the survival rate for infant CPR is. I know for adults it's shockingly low, particularly without an AED. Pediatric AEDs exist, but I doubt many concerned parents have one. Don't get me wrong, I support people learning CPR. It's better than nothing.
    - ledauphin 7y ago
blowski 7y ago
I can see this being useful in the case of extremely premature babies, or those significantly more vulnerable than usual. But for the average new parent this is just another way of increasing anxiety. In my humble non-medical-expert opinion, you really shouldn't get one unless you're told to by someone qualified.
- drankula3 7y ago
  Technology always leads to new norms and standards of living. We have medicine that cures infections that would have absolutely killed us a hundred years ago. We have machines that can route blood around your heart while doctors replace it with another one. Here we have a technology that has the potential to reduce the occurrence of SIDS(sudden infant death syndrome) at a cheap cost once the tech is commoditized. I understand your hesitance in promoting anything that can exacerbate the anxieties of people unnecessarily(our society is already bad enough at this), but as a parent, that anxiety was already there for me, and I think it's there for most other parents too. I used to wake up and check my daughter in the middle of the night because she hadn't cried in a while. This would have brought me peace of mind.
  - amerkhalid 7y ago
    Same here. As new parents, we followed all guidelines for preventing SIDS but still were always checking on our son all the time. I highly doubt we would have trusted any device 100%. But it would have brought a little bit of peace of mind which new parents desperately need.
    - boringg 7y ago
      New parent here - there's a learning curve and once you are over it (ie have balanced your anxieties with the realities that your child is probably ok seeping at night) you will have traded off your privacy for a device that to your own language you wouldn't trust 100%. It feels like this is just a push for positive stories on privacy infringement to make it easier to buy the products. I.e. "We got these spy devices in our house, but for the first 3-6 months of our new child being in the house, it monitored them for breathing"
raisedbyninjas 7y ago
Tangentially similar breath and heartrate monitoring by magnifying changes in video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWycBEHn3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWycBEHn3s
beefman 7y ago
Or you could just sleep with your infant. Note the dystopian photo at the top.
- swsieber 7y ago
  Or you could be awake with your infant. I'm pretty sure both my infant and I sleep a lot better when we're in different rooms. But yeah, that's a sort of creepy photo.
usgroup 7y ago
It’d be crazy to rely on something like this. I think you’d want the analogue to be much more robust if you’re gonna rely on it keeping your child alive...
eth0up 7y ago
I wonder if there's much preventing such tech from being reapplied for, say, furtively monitoring keystrokes or other forms of questionable eavesdropping, in a kind of acoustic Van Eck phreaking sort of way.
aitchnyu 7y ago
Can anybody help me try to understand it? I imagine they play a white noise and use their directional mics to get the result of interference of white noise and breathing sounds. But "noise is reflected back" makes it seem like radar. Why is it not sonar/radar then? And with "With this skill, called BreathJunior", it makes it sound like existing smart speakers can do it. This has nothing to do with smart speakers right?

54 points by dnetesn 7y ago

Yup. So another excuse for the "smart speaker"[0] to be always listening and always transmitting data. And honestly, I'm not against a microphone that's always on. But I am against a microphone that sends what it hears to the cloud, to be owned, stored and processed by some third parties in unknown ways. Ambient computing is a very fine concept on its own - but what it needs is to be pried out from the hands of commercial entities driving it. It should be implemented in such a way that the user owns the data, storage of that data is entirely decoupled from the software that's being run on it and from the cloud that brings the two together. That is, I should be able to choose software that operates on a data I own, in a place I want it to, and that software should not exfiltrate that data. I guess it won't happen without a long legal fight that's still ahead of us. But until then, there's no way in hell I'm going to let such a device be anywhere near my kid. -- [0] - It's funny how the name emphasizes the speaker aspect, whereas the core competency of such devices is the microphone.

rtkwe 7y ago
I'm not sure where you're getting that this requires transmitting all the microphone data to the cloud. All of this could in theory be done on the device without cloud processing at all.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  It could be, but it won't. The article mentions mainstream "smart speakers", none of which does it, and whose producers have every incentive to not do it.
  - X6S1x6Okd1st 7y ago
    Yet the photos from the article clearly show it running on a laptop.
    - swsieber 7y ago
      > To make things easy for new parents, the team made a system that could run on a smart speaker that replicates the hardware in an Amazon Echo. > "Smart speakers are becoming more and more prevalent, and these devices already have the ability to play white noise," said co-author Shyam Gollakota, an associate professor in the UW's Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering and the director of the UW computing for health group. "If we could use this white noise feature as a contactless way to monitor infants' hand and leg movements, breathing and crying, then the smart speaker becomes a device that can do it all, which is really exciting." They are clearly aiming to get this running on smart speakers.
edejong 7y ago
I came to the comments just to voice a similar concern. We need to take ownership of our data, whether it is biometric, environmental or social. And once we have established this for ourselves, we should make it as accessible as the commercial offerings. This should be the new open source movement. Projects like OpenHAB and homebrew sensor networks with low power open source schematics and drivers. Hey, we are already heading there. It’s just the masses that will stay ignorant for a decade.

imglorp 7y ago

Relevant to SIDS tech: https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder https://tricorder.xprize.org/prizes/tricorder https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/22/qualcomm-tricorder-x-prize-is-another-poorly-conceived-contest/ https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/22/qualcomm-tricorder-x-pri...

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

cushychicken 7y ago

> "We start out by transmitting a random white noise signal. But we are generating this random signal, so we know exactly what the randomness is," said first author Anran Wang, a doctoral student in the Allen School. "That signal goes out and reflects off the baby. Then the smart speaker's microphones get a random signal back. Because we know the original signal, we can cancel out any randomness from that and then we're left with only information about the motion from the baby." Reading between the lines of this, it sounds like these folks found another clever use for adaptive filtering. I wonder how well this plays along with whatever adaptive filtering is already going on inside an Amazon Echo? As I've learned more about the guts of voice speakers' signal processing, I've come to realize that adaptive filtering plays a huge part in making modern acoustics and telecom possible. It's a super cool subset of signal processing if you're interested in that sort of thing. https://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/ug/overview-of-adaptive-filters-and-applications.html https://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/ug/overview-of-adaptive-f...

aidenn0 7y ago
It seems like the equivalent of a DSSS radar, but with sonar.
- cushychicken 7y ago
  Not sure, but I wouldn't be surprised. I don't understand much of how radar works, but my understanding at a really basic level is that you're sending out some known modulated signal and then extracting some information from the magnitude and delay of that returned signal. In that case, this is the same idea, but in the adaptive filtering case, it's actually the errors in the received modulated signal that you care about, because the error contains all the signals you didn't originally transmit - things like room sounds, or audio multipath. I will admit, however, that I don't know enough about radar to know that we're not talking past one another. XD

rootusrootus 7y ago

Another way to feed your paranoia as a new parent. There are other monitors already which purport to monitor infants breathing, and I haven't met anyone yet who used them who recommends them. Inevitably they give false positives, and it's hell on your nerves. After a while you learn to just ignore them so you don't go insane. Then you take out the monitor because what's the point.

ledauphin 7y ago
This is the internet, though, so people like me will always exist. We bought a fairly cheap wearable monitor early on, and it works. Both in the sense that it has given us a couple of false positives when it got out of position, and in the more important sense that it has only done so a handful of times and the rest of the time I sleep much more soundly because I know it would go off if our child stopped breathing. Honestly, this is not a truly hard problem to solve, and I'm kind of amazed that the APA hasn't figured that out yet. On the other hand, obviously the effect on different parents may vary.
- whatshisface 7y ago
  What use is it to know when your child stops breathing? Is there anything you can do about it?
  - goodcanadian 7y ago
    CPR, artificial respiration, call an ambulance . . .
    - catalogia 7y ago
      I wonder what the survival rate for infant CPR is. I know for adults it's shockingly low, particularly without an AED. Pediatric AEDs exist, but I doubt many concerned parents have one. Don't get me wrong, I support people learning CPR. It's better than nothing.
  - ledauphin 7y ago

blowski 7y ago

I can see this being useful in the case of extremely premature babies, or those significantly more vulnerable than usual. But for the average new parent this is just another way of increasing anxiety. In my humble non-medical-expert opinion, you really shouldn't get one unless you're told to by someone qualified.

drankula3 7y ago
Technology always leads to new norms and standards of living. We have medicine that cures infections that would have absolutely killed us a hundred years ago. We have machines that can route blood around your heart while doctors replace it with another one. Here we have a technology that has the potential to reduce the occurrence of SIDS(sudden infant death syndrome) at a cheap cost once the tech is commoditized. I understand your hesitance in promoting anything that can exacerbate the anxieties of people unnecessarily(our society is already bad enough at this), but as a parent, that anxiety was already there for me, and I think it's there for most other parents too. I used to wake up and check my daughter in the middle of the night because she hadn't cried in a while. This would have brought me peace of mind.
- amerkhalid 7y ago
  Same here. As new parents, we followed all guidelines for preventing SIDS but still were always checking on our son all the time. I highly doubt we would have trusted any device 100%. But it would have brought a little bit of peace of mind which new parents desperately need.
  - boringg 7y ago
    New parent here - there's a learning curve and once you are over it (ie have balanced your anxieties with the realities that your child is probably ok seeping at night) you will have traded off your privacy for a device that to your own language you wouldn't trust 100%. It feels like this is just a push for positive stories on privacy infringement to make it easier to buy the products. I.e. "We got these spy devices in our house, but for the first 3-6 months of our new child being in the house, it monitored them for breathing"

raisedbyninjas 7y ago

Tangentially similar breath and heartrate monitoring by magnifying changes in video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWycBEHn3s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rWycBEHn3s

beefman 7y ago

Or you could just sleep with your infant. Note the dystopian photo at the top.

swsieber 7y ago
Or you could be awake with your infant. I'm pretty sure both my infant and I sleep a lot better when we're in different rooms. But yeah, that's a sort of creepy photo.

usgroup 7y ago

It’d be crazy to rely on something like this. I think you’d want the analogue to be much more robust if you’re gonna rely on it keeping your child alive...

eth0up 7y ago

I wonder if there's much preventing such tech from being reapplied for, say, furtively monitoring keystrokes or other forms of questionable eavesdropping, in a kind of acoustic Van Eck phreaking sort of way.

aitchnyu 7y ago

Can anybody help me try to understand it? I imagine they play a white noise and use their directional mics to get the result of interference of white noise and breathing sounds. But "noise is reflected back" makes it seem like radar. Why is it not sonar/radar then? And with "With this skill, called BreathJunior", it makes it sound like existing smart speakers can do it. This has nothing to do with smart speakers right?