Innovations in the home have revolved around making a “smart-home”, which can be controlled from anywhere. But, the truly revolutionary in-home innovation is the creation of the health-aware household.
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Dina Katabi and her research team at MIT have created a stationary in-home device that will disrupt all senior medical-alert systems.
Using radio waves with 1/1000th the power of your wifi signal, it can peer through your walls and track your movements—all without literally seeing you as an invasive camera might.
Called the WiGait, this device doesn’t focus on actually “seeing” a person in a room. Instead, the WiGait bounces a signal off of your body to measure gait velocity (what doctors sometimes call the “sixth vital sign”).
Gait velocity is determined by how fast someone walks coupled with their stride length. In other words, it’s a non-visual description of movement.
For that reason, gait velocity has always been a great indicator of elderly mobility.
While most medical alert systems require seniors to press a button to alert authorities, the WiGait is a system that would understand a person’s normal gait velocity, and alert authorities when there were abstractions (falling) to this walking “identity”.
This initial capability may just be the beach-head to even more functionality.
The health-aware home
Fitness trackers are great for holding yourself accountable to staying active, but imagine if your house was aware of your activity and held you accountable for staying fit.
Gait velocity measurements would give a glimpse into just how sedentary one’s lifestyle is and could suggest getting off your lazy butt when you’ve been watching too much TV.
The health-aware home could also detect cognitive decline or cardiac disease, all depending on the way one moves about their home.
The WiGait is still in its very early stages of testing and is not perfect (88.4 – 99.3 % accuracy), but as doctors and patients work in unison to uncover the abilities of this device, I think we’ll see the health-aware home soon become a reality.
Presently, our environments have a huge impact on our quality of life. According to the University of Maryland, 70% of health outcomes are attributed to behavior and environment.
You can’t help but wonder how this statistic will change once your environment begins looking at your movement and monitoring your behaviors for optimal health.