Making Invisible Wireless Signals Visible

wireless signal

 

Our reliance on Wi-Fi to connect our devices to the world wide web has propagated and flourished in the last ten years.

 

These little hotspots have become synonymous with being connected to the world in ways that have indeed become a part of our society. Until recently, Wi-Fi was used specifically for communicating, whether via email or instant message, and even more recently using video chat applications such as Skype. While we have had broadband connections for longer than 10 years, it’s only really be the last half dozen or so years since wireless internet has become the number one way for connecting to the internet.

What if there were other applications for these and other types of signals? We’re awash in these wireless signals all the time now and they’re almost everywhere we go in cities, so it stands to reason that with such an abundant amount of these signals that they could have many other uses in our daily lives. One of the biggest obstacles to real world use has been our inability to see these signals, and knowing what sort of application we could use them for if we could.

Recently, there has been one company out of Waterloo Ontario Canada that has made it its goal to not only develop such technology, but also find affordable and practical uses for it. Enter Cognitive, a young startup that is aiming to do for Wi-Fi and cellular signals what the modern smartphone has done for society; flip it on its head.

What Else Can These Signals Be Used For?

The fact that these signals are everywhere, from small towns to large cities leads to our first example of how the technology can be applied; security. Because Wi-Fi and cellular signals are everywhere, they can be harnessed to employ security measures with regards to your wireless network as well as your physical home or office.

For example, ‘Amera’, Cognitives first device that can see these signals floating around us, can alert network owners when unauthorized devices are nearby or when new unsecured networks suddenly appear within range. The device gathers the data and sends it to the company’s cloud computing platform named mist and in turn is processed and sent to your mobile device all in real time.

Let’s say a coffee shop offers their customer free Wi-Fi to its customers. Amera can detect when a hacker attempts to display their own network in attempts to fool customers into connecting to the fake network the hacker sets up to look like that of the coffee shop. Appropriate alerts and countermeasures can be deployed, stopping the would be attacker from gathering personal information of unsuspecting customers.

While Cognitive plans to make Amera a platform that hosts other uses much like a cellphone allows people to do more than just call, security is their initial focus. The system can also be used to detect slight variations or disturbances to the signals themselves, alerting homeowners when something moves within the range of the system. Because the signals are literally everywhere, there is nowhere that burglar could avoid the signal and would trip the alarms as soon as he was in range. A video camera surveillance system may rely on visually triggered motion or could be fooled if a burglar avoids the areas the cameras cannot see.

Other Fascinating Applications

As mentioned there are obvious real world applications for this type of technology, but there are several other markets that Cognitive could tap into as well, such as:

  • Crowd flow and traffic monitoring
  • Device Health
  • Spectrum Analysis
  • Wireless cyber security

The folks behind the idea for the technology, which was actually first conceived on a short drive to a gas station, have needed to make sure that Amera would become a platform that consumers would embrace. This meant keeping power consumption low, costs down and ensuring it passed electromagnetic compatibility tests and other technological and safety regulations. Eighteen months later, it was ready for market and is being funded by some heavy backers. Much of the hardware that the device is built on is as powerful as possible while still maintaining the requirements to allow it to flourish in not only its initial market but also in others later on. The star of the show, the R10 chip, is said to sport 5 CPU cores and has significant capabilities in detecting and processing wireless signals in real-time as it works with numerous radios for sensing wireless signals.

Chief Editor of DroidHorizon. I own a few different devices at the minute and enjoy writing reviews and sharing what I think is cool. You can often find me playing Playstation 4 or sprawled across the couch with headphones on (maybe with a nice beer or gin & tonic in-hand)

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