China’s Perspicace hired stunt performers to fall over to train sensor
It was an unfortunate episode — but Yip, the CEO and founder of Shanghai-based startup Perspicace, thinks it could have been avoided. At the Microsoft AI Summit in Hong Kong, he showed me what he calls a Wi-Fi Bio-detector: a device that looks like a standard wall socket combined with a switch box.
Yip says the device combines a Wi-Fi router with AI algorithms that are designed to detect various kinds of human movement. Here’s how it works: In a room without people, a Wi-Fi router distributes signals in a stable and tidy manner. But when someone enters the room, the signals become disturbed — creating noise that is instantly registered on the detector.
So for example, if you’re standing, you disturb the signals in a certain kind of way. But if you then fall, your movement creates a different kind of disturbance entirely. Yip’s challenge was to find a way to translate the data he was gathering into something useful — working out whether this signal disturbance he detected meant a person was standing, sitting, even breathing heavily.
Yip, who returned to China after a career in AI with the French gaming giant Ubisoft, started working on the idea in 2013. Yip says he hired a large number of people to work in teams of three — collecting data 24-7. One person would go about his daily life, while the others record his movement. While that happens, a machine in the background would register any changes in Wi-Fi signals.
The article is originally published by Abacus.
