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from the perhaps-the-police-will-wear-them? dept.
Over at IEEE spectrum is an article on the use of wearable inertial sensors to spot firearm usage. based on a paper published by Charles Loeffler and available on PLOS One.
The suggestion is that this can be used to monitor convicted criminals released on parole or probation, by adding this to the existing electronic monitoring devices worn by some convicts.
Loeffler’s data shows that signature is hard to mistake. Of 357 gunshots tested in the study, just three were mistakenly identified as something else. The technique also gives very few false positives—just three of the 693 other instances of accelerometer activity tracked in the study were misidentified as gunshots. Further fine-tuning of the technique even has the potential to distinguish between the accelerometer signatures created by different calibers of firearms.
Combined with sensors that track parolees via GPS, accelerometers could be used to alert police departments immediately when a person wearing a wrist monitor fired a gun. That would save authorities the time and energy involved in cross-referencing the location of a reported gun shot with the whereabouts of the many monitors they track. Not only would that improve police response times, it could potentially deter people being monitored from firing in the first place, cutting down on gun crime.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by randmcnatt on Thursday September 11 2014, @11:23AM
The Wright brothers were not the first to fly: they were the first to land.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Rivenaleem on Thursday September 11 2014, @02:59PM
Exactly, include a camera that records whenever the safety is off, and takes high res images right before a shot is taken. Include with the video and pictures all the usual metadata.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by bob_super on Thursday September 11 2014, @04:25PM
By the time the safety is off, most of the important context information is already gone.
For everyone's safety, the cops should record from the time they get out of the car, and the car should record 360 degrees too.
Some cops are trigger-happy, but some idiots are also provocation-happy, and in both cases you want to know what led to a gun being drawn.
(Score: 2) by Rivenaleem on Friday September 12 2014, @08:11AM
I heartily agree, but since this article is about having an accelerometer on the wrist of the cop to detect just the shots, and not about recording the whole interaction, the scope of my comment was purely in relation to gathering data about the act of firing the gun and how attaching a camera to record all the firing data would be superior to an accelerometer-wristband.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday September 11 2014, @06:31PM
Which is why this will probably never be implemented. Just sayin'.