Wearable Tech Jammers Could Be Key to Consumer Privacy

When doom scrolling through social media, it’s common for an ad to pop into your feed that is so relevant, it makes you question whether or not your devices are listening to your conversations. The situation is less eavesdropping and more likely the result of finely tuned algorithms. However, some people (myself included) believe that we’re living our lives surrounded by hot mics, be it on our wrists, in our pockets, on our nightstands, countertops, etc. It’s a connected world; even the fridge is listening.

To increase personal security, a team of researchers at the University of Chicago’s Human-Computer Integration Lab has developed a wearable device that may be a perfect solution to our privacy problems. The wearable microphone jammeris a prototype privacy bracelet that uses ultrasonic transducers to jam any nearby microphone.

Typically, transducers aren’t a perfect solution and have blind spots. Current jammers need to be pointed directly at the microphone you wish to jam. But, because the transducers are placed around the bracelet, the user’s natural hand gestures and other movements increase jamming coverage. The design also helps jam any mics that might be out of sight.

In a recent test, the bracelet successfully jammed a smartphone, smartwatch, voice assistant, and even the camera crew filming the demonstration.

A jamming device’s efficacy is determined by the word error rate, which measures speech recognition or machine translation systems. When they’re not pointed directly at the microphone, current jammers only have a word error rate of about 26% — you can still get the gist of the conversation or sensitive information if you have 75% of the audio. When using the wearable jammer prototype in trials, the word error rate was more than 87% with natural movement. When the device was in a static position, it was still up to 60% effective.

The researchers are now working with the Polsky Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Chicago tocommercialize the tech for use in wearable consumer products and defense systems.