Google-funded ‘super sensor’ project brings IoT powers to dumb appliances

The so-called ‘smart home’ often comes across looking incredibly dumb. Either you have to shell out lots of money to replace perfectly functional appliances for their Internet-connected equivalents — which might then be vulnerable to hacking or whose functionality could be bricked at manufacturer whim.

Or you go around manually affixing sensors to each appliance and moveable fixture in your home — and end up with the equivalent of interior pebble-dashing comprised of stick-on gadgetry; a motion sensor and/or ugly-looking Dash-style button on everything.

And that’s before you even consider how, in inviting this bevy of connected device makers into your home, you’re typically letting out a flow of what can be highly sensitive personal data to be sucked into the cloud for profit-seeking entities to pore over.

Researchers at CMU’s Future Interfaces Group are taking a different approach to enable the sensing of indoor environments, and reckon there’s a quicker, less expensive and less cumbersome way to create what’s at least a smarter interior. And one that might have some privacy benefits too, depending on the deploying entity.

What they’ve built so far does not offer as many remote control options as a fully fledged, IoT-enabled appliance scenario could. But if it’s mostly signals intelligence on what’s going on indoors that you want — plus the ability to leverage that accrued real-time intel to support contextually aware apps for the lived environment — their approach looks very promising.

The team is presenting their research at the ACM CHI Conference in Denver this week. They’ve also produced the below demo video showing their test system in action.

The system involves using a single custom plug-in sensor board that’s packed with multiple individual sensors — but, crucially from a privacy point of view, no camera. The custom sensor (shown in the diagram below) uses machine learning algorithms to process the data it’s picking up, so it can be trained to identify various types of domestic activity, such as (non-smart) appliances being turned on — like a faucet, cooker or blender. It can even identify things like cupboard doors or a microwave door being opened and closed; know which burner on your hob is on; and identify that a toilet has been flushed.

So it’s effectively a device that enables multiple synthetic sensors that are able to track lots of different types of in-room activity — thereby getting around the tedium and unsightliness of needing to stick sensors on everything, while also eradicating all those potential points of failure (i.e. when physical sensors come unstuck or break or run out of battery power).

The idea is a “quick and dirty” smart home system that’s aiming for general-purpose sensing in each room it’s located in, says CMU researcher Chris Harrison. And while others have also been thinking along similar multi-sensor lines this project has benefited from uplift by being part of a $500,000+ Google-funded IoT ecosystem research effort aimed at encouraging the development of an open ecosystem for connected devices.

Google’s 2015 research proposal for that, which the CMU ‘super sensor’ project forms a part of, describes the main goal and priorities as follows:

Harrison says he can’t discuss any specific plans Google might have to commercialize the super sensor research. But there are some pretty obvious potential avenues for the company to plug something like this into its own product portfolio — say by using its Google Home voice-driven AI speaker as the central in-home interface that’s being fed intelligence by a system of super sensors. The homeowner would then be in a position to be informed of and ask about domestic goings on via that central IoT device.