Page 19 - Vayyar in the News

How does Vayyar’s technology differ from something like the Kinect? Well, for one thing, the Kinect is primarily a camera-based optics system, while Vayyar’s system is radio frequency based. Kinect works pretty well in the dark, but radio frequency works without any light. For another, the Kinect offers 30 frames per second, while Melamed claims that Vayyar’s technology can process 100 frames per second.
Vayyar’s chip can sense both the temperature in a room as well as the heart rate of different people sitting in the same room.
This breakthrough in imaging tech is what can happen when a successful executive moves on to the next chapter. Melamed was the vice president of Architecture and General Manager of Mobile Wireless at Intel back in 2010, when he asked himself: What’s next? He began looking at medical imaging, which still relies on technology that was developed before mobile computing made chips and sensors low cost and lightweight.
“I started to ask the questions, ‘How come there is no simple, easy-to-use modality that you can bring to people instead of these big machines that cost so much money?” he recalls. “Breast cancer was a huge problem to solve and a big market, so a good combination,” he adds (it’s also an illness that touched his life personally when his mother developed the disease). Melamed decided to apply expertise from both his work inside the Israeli Defense Force 20 years ago and his time at Intel working with high-end communication chips to build a better detection system for breast cancer–and soon realized that the radio transmission-based technology he was developing could be applied to a range of industries and problems. Vayyar was born.
Seeing through walls.
In the lead-up to its April launch, the Walabot team is giving the technology to a handful of leading makers and holding internal hackathons, and studying how people play with the Vayyar chip. “The whole point is to start a community around it and have people kind of play around with it and develop around it,” Melamed says, adding that he hopes developers will share their application code with each other.
Melamed says he believes great innovations occur when people find ways to apply technological breakthroughs in one industry to another—and thinks his work on Vayyar, which combines his experiences in the digital communications world with radio frequency technology, is a prime example of that. “I think a lot of the breakthroughs came when people took one technology from one industry and implemented it in a totally different industry, and