AI startup builds a Wi-Fi motion sensor that knows when you’ve fallen over

China’s Perspicace hired stunt performers to fall over to train sensor

Perspicace’s Wi-Fi Bio-detector. (Picture: Abacus)

One evening a few years ago, Ken Yip’s grandmother fell off her bed in a Shanghai flat. Frail and injured, the elderly woman spent the whole night lying on the floor, unable to get up and ask for help.

It was an unfortunate episode -- but Yip, the CEO and founder of Shanghai-based startup Perspicace, thinks it could have been avoided. At the Microsoft AI Summit in Hong Kong, he showed me what he calls a Wi-Fi Bio-detector: a device that looks like a standard wall socket combined with a switch box.

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