Google, Ford want to use small radar for more touch-free control, health-tracking

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Radar might play a more significant part in more personal tech soon. Google, Ford, and four other partners have published specs for a Ripple standard to bring small radar to more devices in a "privacy-respecting" fashion. The framework, hosted by the Consumer Technology Association, theoretically lets any device maker use small-scale radar for tasks like touch-free gesture control, occupancy detection, health monitoring, and more.

You can check out the early details through GitHub, focusing on interoperability between radar types. Developers can initially add special use cases through extensions, but the Ripple team hopes to build those add-ons into later versions of the standard. As Engadget pointed out, Google and Ford's involvement makes sense given they ship products with radar in them (Nest Hub for Google and Ford's Co-Pilot 360).