The CSAIL team has already used the system in hospitals and assisted living facilities to monitor people for issues including Parkinson’s, dementia and COVID-19. The researchers have improved the system, which uses deep machine learning. It can identify activities, such as sleeping, reading, cooking and watching TV, and items like laptops. RF-Diary is accurate in classifying more than 30 household activities over 90 percent of the time, according to the researchers.

It uses a floor map of a subject’s living space to determine what actions they undertake in different parts of the home, and what objects they use to do so. To set up the system, the person who RF-Diary is monitoring has to carry out several actions. The system will also observe them walking around their living space to make sure it doesn’t monitor any locations the person doesn’t have access to, since radio signals can travel through walls.

Beyond protecting privacy, testing showed that the system is more effective at tracking someone’s activities in dark and “occluded” settings than video-based systems. Radio signals don’t need light, after all. The researchers plan to adapt the system for homes and hospitals, with the aim of selling it commercially.

Later on, ADT will borrow Google’s tech to enhance its own capabilities. “Over time, Nest’s devices, powered by Google’s machine learning capabilities, will enhance ADT’s security monitoring,” Google said. “The goal is to give customers fewer false alarms, more ways to receive alarm events and better detection of potential incidents inside and around the home.”

The AI capabilities will also provide more helpful notifications, according to Google, for things like package delivery detection. ADT security customers will also gain access to Nest Aware, which tracks people coming and going into your home, with intelligent alerts and an event history up to 30 days long.

Google has a wide range of Nest home automation and security products, including the Nest Hub Max, Nest Secure Alarm, Nest indoor and outdoor cameras, the Nest X Yale lock and Nest thermostats and temperature sensors. However, those products can be tricky to install and understand for non-technical folks. With ADT, it would get a professional sales and installation network, while ADT will gain access to Google’s product lineup and deep learning expertise.

Samsung’s Galaxy Watch Active 2 was designed with a raft of health monitoring features in mind, but it’s taken a while for some, such as the ECG sensor, to get the official go-ahead from the relevant authorities. Now, after being given the green light by the South Korean drug safety agency, Samsung is rolling out blood pressure monitoring to the device. As with the ECG sensor, though, it’ll only be available for users in South Korea.

Nonetheless, the move once again highlights just how much the device is capable of. After calibrating the watch with a traditional cuff-style blood pressure monitor, wearers can then use its pulse wave analysis to measure their blood pressure anywhere and at any time. Calibration will have to be repeated every four weeks for optimum accuracy. Readings are then synced to the watch’s accompanying Samsung Health app, and users can track their data over days, weeks and months, and share it directly with their healthcare provider should they wish. According to SamMobile, the feature is rolling out now, available to all Galaxy Watch Active 2 users with the latest firmware update.

The tool would provide the FBI with access to the full social media profiles of persons-of-interest. That could include information like user IDs, emails, IP addresses and telephone numbers. The tool would also allow the FBI to track people based on location, enable persistent keyword monitoring and provide access to personal social media history. According to the RFP, “The mission-critical exploitation of social media will enable the Bureau to detect, disrupt, and investigate an ever growing diverse range of threats to U.S. National interests.”

But a tool of this nature is likely to raise a few red flags, despite the FBI’s call for “ensuring all privacy and civil liberties compliance requirements are met.” The government doesn’t have the best track record with regard to social media surveillance. Early this year, the ACLU sued the government over its use of social media surveillance of immigrants, and the Trump administration has proposed allowing officials to snoop on the social media accounts of Social Security disability recipients.

The FBI is soliciting contracts for a new social media surveillance tool: https://t.co/3AglNJuote

They’re not beating around the bush in terms of how pervasively they’re monitoring social media content: pic.twitter.com/Zo528lt8Pd

— Hugh Handeyside (@hhandeyside) July 12, 2019

Monitoring social media for threats makes sense, to an extent. And the CIA already invests heavily in its own social network monitoring tools. But there is a danger that a tool like this could be abused by those in power and violate civil liberties.