X-ray vision has long seemed like a far-fetched sci-fi fantasy, but over the last decade a team led by Professor Dina Katabi from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has continually gotten us closer to seeing through walls. Their latest project, "RF-Pose," uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people's postures and movement, even from the other side of a wall. The researchers use a neural network to analyze radio signals that bounce off people's bodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits, and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions. The team says that RF-Pose could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis (MS), and muscular dystrophy, providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

A group of researchers and students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have developed a technology that can identify objects and follow them even as they're obscured by other objects. In a sense, that technically means it can see through walls. It doesn't actually "see" through walls, of course, because that's impossible. Instead, the system uses radar-like technology to track people as they move around. It's called RF-Pose, and early tests show it's able to determine whether someone is walking, sitting down, standing, and waving.

MIT has created a system likened to X-ray vision, but the AI can track a person through walls -- or identify one specific person out of a group of 100 people -- by using wireless signals. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) calls it RF-Pose. How could they ignore the blaring red alert of potential privacy and spying issues and continue to develop artificial intelligence (AI) that can monitor a person's movements through a solid wall using wireless radio waves? The team says that RF-Pose could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis (MS), and muscular dystrophy, providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is trying to make you see through a wall. Well no, not really – but the outcome is the same. Under the guidance of Professor Dina Katabi, a team at CSAIL is working on a project named RF-Pose, which, according to MIT, uses artificial intelligence and a neural network to sense people's postures and movement from the other side of a wall. "The researchers use a neural network to analyse radio signals that bounce off people's bodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits, and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions," the article said. The video above demonstrates and explains the mechanism.

VID AI systems can track the movements of people hidden behind walls by inspecting radio waves reflected off their bodies, according to a new study. The model dubbed "RF-Pose" starts off by transmitting low power radio signals that can penetrate through walls using a wireless Wi-Fi device. These waves bounce back when reflected off a human body, creating heatmaps, and these are then processed by a neural network to build a two-dimensional stick figure representing the person behind the wall. During the training process, RF-Pose is trained using both the heatmap images created from their device and images taken from cameras. The researchers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) collected more than 50 hours of footage of people in 50 different environments, including people walking along corridors, or engaging in a lesson in a classroom.

X-ray vision has long seemed like a far-fetched sci-fi fantasy, but over the last decade a team led by Professor Dina Katabi from MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) has continually gotten us closer to seeing through walls. Their latest project, "RF-Pose," uses artificial intelligence (AI) to teach wireless devices to sense people's postures and movement, even from the other side of a wall. The researchers use a neural network to analyze radio signals that bounce off people's bodies, and can then create a dynamic stick figure that walks, stops, sits and moves its limbs as the person performs those actions. The team says that the system could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's and multiple sclerosis (MS), providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns.

The team says that RF-Pose could be used to monitor diseases like Parkinson's, multiple sclerosis (MS), and muscular dystrophy, providing a better understanding of disease progression and allowing doctors to adjust medications accordingly. It could also help elderly people live more independently, while providing the added security of monitoring for falls, injuries and changes in activity patterns. The team is currently working with doctors to explore RF-Pose's applications in health care.

The ability to see what's happening on the other side of a wall or in another room has always been an aspect of science fiction. We don't have a technology good enough to see directly through walls, but thanks to the power of machine intelligence, a group of researchers at MIT, Massachusetts, is inching closer to turn that case into reality. The team at MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory is working on a project called RF-Pose. As part of this effort, they are using an AI-based system to sense the movement or posture of a person on the other side of a wall. Essentially, as a person moves, walks, sits, jumps, or stops behind a wall, the neural network analyzes the radio signals bouncing off his/her body and generates confidence map using it.

For decades, prestigious scientists have been searching for a way to see through walls. And, in the past few years, they've succeeded -- they created technology that uses WiFi to sense people through walls. Only, the signal it returns is really scant. Now, researchers at MIT have developed a new machine learning algorithm that not only detects people's movements, it also models what they are actually doing. Fortunately for people who value the modest privacy walls provide, the new technology just recreates a bare-bones stick figure that matches the person's pose and movements.

The Machines now have X-ray vision. A new piece of software has been trained to use wifi signals -- which pass through walls, but bounce off living tissue -- to monitor the movements, breathing, and heartbeats of humans on the other side of those walls. The researchers say this new tech's promise lies in areas like remote healthcare, particularly elder care, but it's hard to ignore slightly more dystopian applications. While it's easy to think of this new technology as a futuristic Life Alert monitor, it's worth noting that at least one member of the research team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology behind the innovation has previously received funding from the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Another also presented work at a security research symposium curated by a c-suite member of In-Q-Tel, the CIA's high-tech venture capital firm.