Naked Science Forum
Non Life Sciences => Technology => Topic started by: smart on 15/04/2017 22:40:23
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If an "App" can monitor someone sleeping patterns, this basically means that the software may contain the technology to monitor brain waves using embedded biosensors.
Any thoughts?
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3914802/
And here is the description of a unobtrusive sleep monitoring model using smartphones: http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~ltx/paper/Unobtrusive%20Sleep%20Monitoring%20using%20Smartphones.pdf
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It could easily be done, but it would require the requisite electrodes to be placed on the scalp so that the phone could measure them. People are doing something similar using mobile phones to record single-lead ECGs (heart tracings) in order to facilitate distance-diagnoses and cardiac rehabilitation. This is particularly helpful in remote locations, such as in Australia where these systems are proving quite helpful, where a trip to the hospital for a 10 minute check-up could mean several days in the car.
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It could easily be done, but it would require the requisite electrodes to be placed on the scalp so that the phone could measure them. People are doing something similar using mobile phones to record single-lead ECGs (heart tracings) in order to facilitate distance-diagnoses and cardiac rehabilitation. This is particularly helpful in remote locations, such as in Australia where these systems are proving quite helpful, where a trip to the hospital for a 10 minute check-up could mean several days in the car.
Chris, you should check out the second paper I posted. No electrodes are required for tracking the duration of sleep using only a single smartphone.
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I see that you have "spying" as a tag on this thread. Please don't tell me that you believe the government can read your mind through smart phones. Smart phones cannot do such a thing.
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I see that you have "spying" as a tag on this thread. Please don't tell me that you believe the government can read your mind through smart phones. Smart phones cannot do such a thing.
Ask Edward Snowden about this...
Personally, I don't claim the "government" is actively spying through smart phones, but I don't see anything technically which could prevent them doing so. I suggest you try expanding your foresight about potential abuses of this technology and your knowledge will exponentially increase.
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Chris, you should check out the second paper I posted. No electrodes are required for tracking the duration of sleep using only a single smartphone.
Monitoring sleep duration is nothing to do with EEG measurements. Doctors have been carrying out "actigraphy" for decades. A smartphone offers a simpler and more convenient way to do it.
I see that you have "spying" as a tag on this thread. Please don't tell me that you believe the government can read your mind through smart phones. Smart phones cannot do such a thing.
Agreed. Tag removed. No conspiracy theories please.
I see that you have "spying" as a tag on this thread. Please don't tell me that you believe the government can read your mind through smart phones. Smart phones cannot do such a thing.
Ask Edward Snowden about this...
Personally, I don't claim the "government" is actively spying through smart phones, but I don't see anything technically which could prevent them doing so. I suggest you try expanding your foresight about potential abuses of this technology and your knowledge will exponentially increase.
There are much easier ways to spy on people and return much finer grained detail about them: by hacking the microphone of their phone, hacking the camera of their computer, downloading the movement patterns of their mobile and obtaining a recent credit card statement...
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Technically this is called "neurotelemetry"..
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Telemetry
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There are much easier ways to spy on people and return much finer grained detail about them: by hacking the microphone of their phone, hacking the camera of their computer, downloading the movement patterns of their mobile and obtaining a recent credit card statement...
You are so old school... :)
Seriously, I think the mass surveillance of citizens through technology is not a conspiracy theory or Edward Snowden is a liar.
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Ask Edward Snowden about this...
Personally, I don't claim the "government" is actively spying through smart phones, but I don't see anything technically which could prevent them doing so.
No government or other entity can use smartphones to secretly monitor your brain waves. Neither of your sources support such a conclusion. The method described in the first link requires secondary hardware (i.e. a headset) in order for the brain waves to detected, which obviously isn't something that you'll be wearing without knowing about it. The method described in the second link doesn't even detect brain waves at all and rather infers sleep patterns based on the user's smartphone usage.
I suggest you try expanding your foresight about potential abuses of this technology and your knowledge will exponentially increase.
I'll wait until it actually becomes possible before I feel any concern about it. As of now, nobody is using smartphones to read minds.
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No government or other entity can use smartphones to secretly monitor your brain waves. Neither of your sources support such a conclusion. The method described in the first link requires secondary hardware (i.e. a headset) in order for the brain waves to detected, which obviously isn't something that you'll be wearing without knowing about it. The method described in the second link doesn't even detect brain waves at all and rather infers sleep patterns based on the user's smartphone usage.
Wireless neurotelemetry is not science fiction my friend. You should really try expanding your mind on what is mass electronic surveillance and apply this to neuroscience.
Wireless EEG acquisition doesnt need a headset.
I hope this helps.
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Wireless neurotelemetry is not science fiction my friend. You should really try expanding your mind on what is mass electronic surveillance and apply this to neuroscience.
Wireless EEG acquisition doesnt need a headset.
I hope this helps.
Show me the evidence. The links you've provided so far are not.
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Show me the evidence. The links you've provided so far are not.
Edward Snowden theory is evidence of mass electronic surveillance.
Wake up..
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Edward Snowden theory is evidence of mass electronic surveillance.
Wake up..
It's a given that electronic surveillance does take place. It's another matter altogether to claim that devices exist that can read your mind at a distance. Again, give us the evidence. So far, you have not. You can't expect to convince someone of an extreme claim sans evidence, do you?
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It's a given that electronic surveillance does take place. It's another matter altogether to claim that devices exist that can read your mind at a distance. Again, give us the evidence. So far, you have not. You can't expect to convince someone of an extreme claim sans evidence, do you?
I cannot give you evidence that wireless neurotelemetry must certainly be state-of-the-art EEG acquisition technology to decode brain waves remotely.
However I argue that smart phones may have embedded EEG acquisition unit to track and monitor brain waves using
wireless neurotelemetry neurodevices.
This technology is also known as Brain-computer interface (BCI).
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I cannot give you evidence that wireless neurotelemetry must certainly be state-of-the-art EEG acquisition technology to decode brain waves remotely.
I'm not asking for evidence that it is state-of-the-art, I'm asking for evidence that it exists in the first place.
However I argue that smart phones may have embedded EEG acquisition unit to track and monitor brain waves using
wireless neurotelemetry neurodevices.
Based on what?
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I'm not asking for evidence that it is state-of-the-art, I'm asking for evidence that it exists in the first place.
If we're talking about it, there's a very high probability that it exists.
However I argue that smart phones may have embedded EEG acquisition unit to track and monitor brain waves using
wireless neurotelemetry neurodevices.
Based on what?
Evidences of mass surveillance of citizens using digital media has been established by Edward Snowden.
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My Fitbit measures my sleep duration (and any times I wake up during the night) because it has an accelerometer on my wrist.
Some smartphone-only apps ask you to put the smartphone under your pillow, and use the accelerometer inside the smartphone.
Neither of them work by measuring your brainwaves - the electrical noise in a typical house or office is pretty high, and the electrical potentials on your scalp are very small - around 10-100uV on points fairly closely spaced on your scalp. It requires careful earthing, shielding and chopper-stabilized amplifiers to extract an EEG signal from the noise.
Since the voltage field falls off rapidly with distance, it is almost impossible to detect these tiny voltages with no electrical contact from a phone in your pocket or on your bedside table.
Even when an EEG is measured from a multi-channel skull cap with conductive electrodes, it does not "read minds" (read thoughts), but can at best read gross aggregate effects of billions of neurons, such as overall brain wave activity (alpha waves, delta waves and sleep spindles), plus some more subtle effects like P300 recognition - but only if you know the exact timing of the stimulus.
If you wanted to detect sleep patterns using a non-contact method from a smartphone, it would be easiest to use the camera in infra-red mode to detect REM (Rapid Eye Movement). If you want to prevent the CIA watching your REM patterns, pull the sheets over your head....
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electroencephalography#Method
I don't doubt that mass-surveillance is big business. But it's much easier to monitor your posts on public websites (like this one) than read your mind using a smartphone.
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If we're talking about it, there's a very high probability that it exists.
That is a non-sequitur. Since people talk about things like Dyson spheres, Shkadov thrusters and Tipler cylinders, does that mean that these technologies also have "a very high probability" of having already been secretly created by some human organization?
Evidences of mass surveillance of citizens using digital media has been established by Edward Snowden.
Evidence of electronic surveillance is not the same as evidence for mind-reading technology in cell phones. That's about like arguing that a program to deport illegal immigrants is evidence that teleporters exist because teleporters could be used to deport people.
So, how about that evidence?
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Not a technical point, but relevant to the topic of use of this hypothetical technology for surveillance.
Being able to collect data is one thing, having the capacity to analyse it is entirely another. Assuming that the technology exists, is sufficiently cheap and simple to manufacture that mass production in secret is feasible and that a government is able to covertly implant these devices into commercial smartphones, an entirely new problem emerges: what to do with all the data? First you need to have the means to interpret electrical transmissions from within the brain in a manner which is intelligible to a machine which can then convert the data input into material which is intelligible to a human analyst. People have a lot of thought a every day and the brain remains active when you're asleep, so the amount of data you are going to have to process is astronomical, even before you get to the problem of filtering so that analysts only see data points likely to be relevant rather than people's inane thoughts about the weather.
If you want to know someone's thoughts, drop a RAT on their phone and read their texts. It's easier.
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Being able to collect data is one thing, having the capacity to analyse it is entirely another. Assuming that the technology exists, is sufficiently cheap and simple to manufacture that mass production in secret is feasible and that a government is able to covertly implant these devices into commercial smartphones, an entirely new problem emerges: what to do with all the data?
They call this "deep learning". They probably uses parallel computing softwares to filter the data collected from the "smartphones" in order to analyze patterns in our behaviors. However, I admit that it is unknown whether theses smartphones have builtin hardware to monitor brainwaves, but i really think its something we need not to underestimate. Do you realize that most smartphones have a builtin optical camera and audio recorder? Perhaps the next step is to collect EEG data from our eyes movements!
tk
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Does modern smartphones have built-in brain-wave-monitoring devices?
Accroding to the evidence produced so far, "no".
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To detect brain waves by the magnetic field they generate requires super cooled "squid" devices and an enclosure free of magnetic fields which could not be built into a smart phone.
It is of course possible to detect brain activity via electrodes on the scalp but to decode them to any extent requires a great deal of computing power.
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There is no evidence that smartphones have any kind of sensors built into them that can read our brain waves. Certainly none that have been posted in this thread.
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To detect brain waves by the magnetic field they generate requires super cooled "squid" devices and an enclosure free of magnetic fields which could not be built into a smart phone.
It is of course possible to detect brain activity via electrodes on the scalp but to decode them to any extent requires a great deal of computing power.
Indeed, one way to stop a real brain wave monitor from working would be to put a smart phone next to it. The interference from the phone would utterly swamp any signals from the brain.
It would be like trying to monitor a candle by seeing if it warmed up a nearby volcano.