Researchers Developing Technology for Smart Speakers Like Amazon Echo to Monitor Heartbeats
Researchers have developed an Artificial Intelligence through which heartbeats can be monitored without physical contact. These devices can detect cardiac arrests or monitor babies’ breathing. The report says the speaker will become a “short-term active sonar system”. We might soon get another use for Amazon Echo, Google Home, or other smart speakers.
Here’s How it Works
Amazon Echo, “When I say, ‘Hey, Alexa,’ the microphones find me together in the room and listen to what I’m saying next,” said Shyam Gollakota, senior author of the study and associate professor at the university. G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering, statement. “It’s basically something that’s happening with the heartbeat.”
The system sends imperceptible sounds from the orator out into a room and, based on the way the sounds are reflected back to the speaker; it can identify and supervise individual heartbeats. Because the heartbeat is such a compact motion, the team’s system uses machine learning to help the smart speaker locate signals from both regular and irregular heartbeats. The so-called ‘self-supervised machine’ learns algorithms on the fly instead of from a training set. This algorithm combines signals from all of the smart speaker’s multiple microphones to identify the shifting heartbeat gesture.
The Ease from Technology
The heartbeat signals that the smart speaker(Amazon Echo, Google Home, or others) detects don’t look like the up and down zigzag lines commonly related to the heartbeat monitors we see. The researchers used a second algorithm to segment the signal into individual heartbeats so that the system could extract what is known as the inter-beat interval, or the amount of time between two heartbeats.
This technology would be so useful for patients with cardiac arrhythmias which are common but at the same time difficult to be diagnosed as they are uncertain. “If you have a device like this, you can monitor a patient on an extended basis and define patterns that are individualized for the patient.” Dr. Arun Sridhar said that this is the future of cardiology. And the beauty of using these kinds of devices is that they are already in people’s homes.
