A smart home vs an automated home

[wallyllama]

@dbemowsk there is some promising research using radar, single source, with multiple receivers in a T shape, in theory it is 3dimensional and whole house. Ill see if i can find the paper I read, i think there is similar work that uses of the shelf wifi gear.

Ive also looked into (and not found enough to do anything with) lower frequency rf,but it seems to require running wieenaround the room, and probably a grid on the floor. It also seemed similar to capacitive sensing, but i dont understand the science enough to truly claim that.

I tried to find research on what EM people absorb and emit, but didnt find much publically available. I dont like the idea of carrying a fevice around for tracking like this.

There are methods that are sensitive enough to detect respiration, used in fire detection that may be of use. Maybe extremely sensitive microphones that can detect heartbeats or footsteps. Some serious signal processing there, which maynlead to DSP devices or maybe some gpu acceleration.

Any of these could be doctorate earning projects, but I keep hoping . Things like intels movidius usb stick may make this stuff more accessible.

Sorry these arent much more than speculatiom, but it what I have found when looking for similar solutions.

Oh 2 more, multi "pixel" ir, omron makes some that are 4x4 or 1x8, several of these, or some kind of scanning to get enough resolutions, or maybe webcams and opencv type computer vision.

[wallyllama]

@wallyllama https://www.researchgate.net/publication/261150852_Doppler_radar_sensor_for_occupancy_monitoring

[wallyllama]

Maybe something like a lytro camera sould be adapted. If the data could be gathered live and processed quickly.....

[dbemowsk]

Back when I was with the OSA project, one thing people were using was cell phone data. Not so easy for detecting what rooms people were in, but you could get some idea of who was home or not. I have also heard of people doing cool hacks with Microsoft Kinect cameras. Here is an example of some good motion sensing with kinect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3-kZjkNIFxY

It's an interesting topic which is why I posted it. The key is gathering data. The more data you can gather, the better the chances you can figure out who is home and where they are in the house.

[NeverDie]

I suggest figuring out what would be the easiest way to try it out. If you like it, then maybe you're more inclined to try computer vision or something that's not so easy.

[matt shepherd]

I know Amazon Echo can now recognize different voices, so it could be listening to see who's home?

[Justas]

Hi, @dbemowsk

Interesting topic :) Not more than speculation here, just an idea - would be thermal cameras that would capture size and shape of subject. By the way kinect is also could be used for this purpose, and maybe even more easily available. Basically that would allow to easily count persons in the rooms, even in the bed - if you have decided just not to get up for some reason ;) Not sure if kineck could detect motionless person under blanket.

Another interesting add-on to the solution searching: Xandem alarm system. They claim that can detect and track more than one radio waves interfering object (subject). But they track changes in rf "net", so if someone just sleeps like a baby - not an option.

And if familiar with machine learning and video processing - I think possibilities becomes very foggy, but endless - some serious data processing and by shape, size etc. you can start recognising not that "if" someone in the room, but "who".

[dbemowsk]

@matt-shepherd Something I hadn't thought of. Nice idea. I do have an Amazon Echo in my living room. My only question on that is have they figured out a way to sparate 2 Amazon devices like an Echo in one room and a Dot in another room to know what room a sound came from? Last I checked, that was not possible.

I was looking into it a bit for other automation stuff like turning on a light in a room. For example, when I am in the living room and I say "turn the overhead light on", it turns on the living room overhead light. When I go into the office, where now I am being heard by the Dot, and I say the same phrase, it should turn the office overhead light on. From the reading that I have done, you can't use them that way, but it should be possible somehow.

[dbemowsk]

Just read this.
https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/26/15876630/amazon-echo-alexa-room-intercom-house-calls-devices-dot-show
Sounds like Amazon actually IS looking to be able to define rooms. I could only hope that somewhere down the road that they add some of that data to the Alexa app for my Vera Plus. I could then script things by room.

[gohan]

In the latest video of Andreas Spiess he is talking about presence detection with an esp32 by sniffing the wifi traffic. There are a number of commercial products that 2 or more can be installed to triangulate signals from smartphones wifi and Bluetooth (I had to install 3 of those in a Mercedes dealership, they were from Netgear if I remember well): basically there is a Master one and they talk to each other on their own separate wifi network; I think it is kind of a mesh network, because they can relay data of distant nodes to the Master device. Of course once installed they need to be calibrated by me standing in a known position with my smartphone in my hands and turning around 90° each time I was told to.
I would have liked too to have the home automation system to be aware of people in the house by the means of BT devices, but it is still in the to do list. As said before the data analysis is going to be tricky but it going to be the main subject of the following years, as more and more AI and machine learning cloud services are popping up (I did a quick peek on the IBM site and I got scared by the amount of services that are available and I will never be able to use, as my programming skills are not really the best)

[matt shepherd]

@dbemowsk
I use mine with Openhab as they have a skill, and im waiting for the new ‘Routines’ to be released, I think Amazon are raising their game and along with the new Routines https://www.theverge.com/2017/9/27/16375050/alexa-routines-echo-amazon-2017 and now that it can recognise different voices https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/11/16460120/amazon-echo-multi-user-voice-new-feature it could help my house turn from Automated to Smart very soon.

[dbemowsk]

@matt-shepherd If they can then get multi tiered location setup down, that would be awesome. By multi tiered location setup I mean being able to define say 2 houses, maybe a main home and a vacation home, and then have devices that have a defined parent, such as main home or vacation home. That would allow for say having two devices named living room light.

My only thought on that for occupancy sensing would be, what if you walked into the room and didn't say anything? None the less, it gets back to what I said about data, the more you have, the more informed your scripting decisions can be. One other thing, if you used multiple echos or dots, you would have to make sure that more than one device doesn't hear the command.

[NeverDie]

The question may turn out to be whether people are willing to accept less than perfect performance in exchange for occasionally more capability (when it works). I think Z-wave and x-10 were good examples (of unreliability) showing that's not what people want. People seem to prefer less capability, but have it work 100% of the time the way it's supposed to. At the very least, WAF is low on unreliable things.

[wallyllama]

http://people.csail.mit.edu/fadel/wivi/

Ok this is the one I was looking for

http://witrack.csail.mit.edu/witrack2-paper.pdf

[dbemowsk]

@wallyllama interesting.

[dbemowsk]

This sounds like a very do-able basic solution to counting the number of people in a room.
http://cocoontech.com/forums/topic/18483-room-occupancy-counters-need-help/
As the guy asks, how do you make it look nice. Would there be another way of doing the two beams? Small laser pointer modules perhaps?

If you put these on every doorway in your house, you could get the logic down to where it would know a fairly exact count of how many people are in a room at any given time.

[wallyllama]

@dbemowsk search "see through walls with wifi". I suspect it could be mounted to the wall and covered with art or something transparent at 10ghz, or with loss of sensitivity in the wall itself.

[dbemowsk]

@wallyllama Though I see future potential in this, I don't see it as anything that can be put into operation easily at this stage.

[NeverDie]

https://www.oshpark.com/shared_projects/fAVBnmO7

[wallyllama]

@NeverDie nice! Sparkfun has a breakout that is 20% cheaper than just the omron sensor. This is is getting closer to my price range, the radar modules are cheap and might be fun, but this would likely yield a working solution sooner.