By Sarah Marquart
Wireless health monitoring is rapidly evolving, promising a future where breathing, heart rate, and other key metrics can be tracked passively, continuously, and without the need for wearables, such as smartwatches, fitness trackers, or other bulky medical monitors.
However, with that promise comes a pressing concern: Who has access to the sensitive data collected by these devices, and how much control do users actually have?
That's the question driving VitalHide, a novel privacy-preserving system developed by researchers at Cornell Tech. Assistant professors Rajalakshmi Nandakumar and Thijs Roumen, along with Cornell Tech Ph.D. students Zekun Chang, Yixuan Gao, and Tanvir Ahmed, unveiled the technology in February 2025 at the HotMobile conference in their paper, VitalHide: Enabling Privacy-Aware Wireless Sensing of Vital Signs.
