RuView
Your WiFi router as a motion sensor
What it is
A WiFi-sensing platform that turns Channel State Information from cheap ESP32 nodes into presence detection, activity recognition, and claimed vital-sign monitoring — no cameras, no wearables. Integrates with Home Assistant, Apple Home, Google Home, and Alexa, with hardware starting around $8.
Why it's interesting
Camera-free ambient sensing is a genuinely hot privacy-versus-surveillance frontier, and this makes it accessible on $8 hardware. It's also a case study in reading extraordinary claims critically.
Use cases
- Smart-home presence automation
- Elder-care monitoring experiments
- WiFi-sensing research
Who it's for
Home Assistant tinkerers, IoT researchers, privacy-conscious builders
Setup
Advanced. ESP32 hardware ($8-140), a host machine, and per-room calibration
Limitations & cautions
Accuracy is highly environment-dependent, the through-wall vital-sign claims are not independently validated, and monitoring people without consent raises real ethical issues. We feature it with those caveats front and center.
Editorial takeaway
Delightful and unsettling in equal measure. Included because it's genuinely novel — and flagged because novelty isn't the same as validation.