
Smart speaker system uses white noise to monitor infants' breathing - dnetesn
https://techxplore.com/news/2019-10-smart-speaker-white-noise-infants.html
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TeMPOraL
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
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
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
Yet the photos from the article clearly show it running on a laptop.

~~~
swsieber
> 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.

------
cushychicken
> _" 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-f...](https://www.mathworks.com/help/dsp/ug/overview-of-adaptive-
filters-and-applications.html)

~~~
aidenn0
It seems like the equivalent of a DSSS radar, but with sonar.

~~~
cushychicken
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

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blowski
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
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
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
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"

~~~
rtkwe
The 'trust' in the post wasn't about privacy but about the breathing
monitoring I'm pretty sure. I.e. they would have still worried about their kid
some even with the device.

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rootusrootus
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
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
What use is it to know when your child stops breathing? Is there anything you
can do about it?

~~~
ledauphin
as I understand, SIDS is sometimes (not always!) literally that an infant is
sleeping so deeply that it forgets to breathe. Sometimes simply rousing them
from the deep sleep would be able to correct the situation if it could be
detected.

~~~
goodcanadian
Oh wow. You reminded me of a mildly traumatic memory of my infant daughter
literally turning blue before my eyes before taking a gasping breath and going
back to normal. It was no more than a couple of seconds (babies turn blue
fast), but it certainly sent my heart racing . . . I think she was crying very
aggressively to get herself into that state; I forget the exact details.

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imglorp
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-
pri...](https://www.cringely.com/2013/01/22/qualcomm-tricorder-x-prize-is-
another-poorly-conceived-contest/)

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eth0up
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.

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aitchnyu
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?

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raisedbyninjas
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)

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

~~~
swsieber
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.

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usgroup
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...

