How does Kinect measure your heart rate from four feet away? - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: MrOmnos
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 10:57:35 am
content: I was looking online for techs similar to that of COD: Modern Warfare's heart beat detector which can be attached to guns to find enemies by detecting their heart beats from several feet away, behind the walls and obstacles. Although I have never used a Xbox, I knew that Kinect could detect your heart rate from few feet away. So, I wanted to know how it was done. Then I came across "The Dailymail" article which says that Kinect detects your rate by using it's camera to detect the change in your skin color when blood flows through it.http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2408748/The-sensor-reads-heartbeat-feet-away-WITHOUT-touching-you.htmlSounds like total bullshit to me. Is this even possible? The change in color must be utterly insignificant . For a white pale person it might be possible (I still have doubts) but for a dark skinned person it seems impossible.

author: XOIIO
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 11:03:15 am
content: You have to remember the kinect uses an infrared camera as well, so it would make sense that it can much more easily tell how much light your skin is reflecting/absorbing, which is how I'm assuming it does it. (or the visual appearance alone with an infrared camera, too tired to read the article.)Cool though, I wonder if longer range ones are in place in airports or high security areas to look for people who are uncharacteristically nervous.

author: daqq
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 11:28:05 am
content: It's not the infrared I'm guessing. You can increase sensitivity a LOT when you know what kind of frequency to expect and when you have tons of pixels to accumulate minor changes from (optical jitter effectively) and can. See:https://www.rt.com/usa/177940-mit-researchers-eavesdropping-chips-bag/

author: CJay
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 11:37:40 am
content: If the Daily Mail told me Christmas day was the 25th of December, I'd go and check a calendar before I believed them.This:https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/kinectforwindows/2015/06/12/detecting-heart-rate-with-kinect/tells you how it works.It's an impressive use of technology

author: lukier
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 01:08:45 pm
content: ToF works in the infrared band so veins are very visible. Then add this kind of amplification and voila:

author: Jeff_Birt
author_rank: Regular Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 01:14:07 pm
content: The little blood oxygen sensor also work with light. They shine two different wavelengths of light through your finger and measure the relative absorption of the two wavelengths.The Kinect sensor is an amazing device. They have several tech videos on Channel 9 that describe how parts of it work. The amount of engineering that went in the audio section is also amazing.

author: bitslice
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 07, 2016, 07:36:24 pm
content: A related technique is to use a phase detection radarhttp://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17979445

author: bitseeker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2016, 01:04:39 am
content: Those temporal amplification examples are really cool. The color amplification of blood flowing into and out of the face is really dramatic.

author: bitseeker
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: September 08, 2016, 01:23:51 am
content: Michael Rubinstein also gave a TEDTalk where he shows more applications of visual magnification. At 8:18 he discusses how it can be used to extract sound from a bag of chips (crisps):https://youtu.be/fHfhorJnAEI?t=8m18s