New Smart Home Occupancy Detection Technology

 

An article in the New Scientist offers an innovative alternative to an on-going problem for home automations systems – occupancy detection.

Reliably sensing if a room is occupied, or trying to locate which room a particular person is in, is invaluable information for a Smart Home system. While this new approach is interesting, we don’t think it’s quite accurate enough to be the answer.

“Your computer could one day track your movements around the house by monitoring the electrical noise made by household appliances as you switch them on and off. Such a system could be cheaper and simpler to operate than the suite of sensors that researchers currently envisage for “smart homes”.

Scientists and visionaries have long imagined smart homes that could cater to our every whim. But their ideas all rely on cameras, microphones or other sensors in every room to track the locations of the occupants.

The new method relies on a device plugged into a single standard wall socket that monitors noise in the electrical supply caused by electrical devices being switched on and off. A computer monitoring the device can then infer that a person must be in that location.”…

Read the full article on the NewScientist.com