8-January-2020 By Jeffrey Cooper
WiFi Sensing in the Smart Home
I saw an interesting announcement today from Linksys regarding new WiFi sensing capabilities. Their Velop system can already be reliably used to detect intruders in your house. While currently they cannot tell the location of the person, they say they are working on this.
They announced this week that the system is getting an upgrade. The system is so sensitive that it can detect breathing.
Projecting out into the not-too-distant future, I can see a lot of uses for a system like this.
First and foremost, their system provides you with a WiFi mesh to cover your house so you have reliable, wireless internet connections everywhere.
New Capabilities Herald Amazing Potential New Use Cases
The additional capabilities announced today, along with a future release of the capability to locate people more precisely in the home promises to open up a lot of opportunities.
- Precise location detection of people in your home. This can be one or more people, and can be used when you are there to control things like Lighting and ambiance. When you leave, it becomes an intruder detection system.
- Breathing detection. While not critical itself (hopefully I am always breathing!), I see a couple of uses here. Using motion analysis and breathing pattern analysis, it should be able to detect a unique biometric fingerprint for each resident of the house. That can identify that Dad is in the Den and mom is in the Game Room with the kids. A smart home can respond in a more customized way to this data.
Additionally, it can tell that the person walking inside the home isn’t you. That would be a really good way to warn you of danger, such as a cat burglar if you don’t have guests. - Sleep Analysis. Breathing data is one of several key biometric markers for quantifying sleep. It could detect the breathing rates of multiple people, as well as motion like Tossing and Turning.
While a system like this alone only provides a certain amount of data, since it’s simply presence and coordinates, it’s essentially blind. However, combined with other sensors, a smart home could be much better with this kind of data. And, since it’s also your WiFi coverage equipment, it’s a double-win.
I don’t know how far off all this capability is, but it is very compelling and something I will keep an eye on.
For Linksys’ current capabilities, follow the link. https://www.linksys.com/us/linksys-aware/ Verge has a write-up on the extended capabilities here: https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/8/21056418/linksys-wellness-pods-aware-health-date
COMMENTS
Looking at it from the Connected Gym angle, I wonder if- when an advanced version is ready, a club could deploy a great meshed WiFi system (their members would be happy with the great coverage!) and at the same time, the WiFi system could do things like count the number of people in a group fitness class, without the creepy factor that facial recognition brings with it?