Researchers at MIT are developing a smart-home technology system that could potentially be used to track homeowners and self-adapt automatically to their home preferences, without the use of a mobile phone. Called Duet, the technology uses reflected wireless signals to localize owners and incorporates logic and algorithms from nearby devices to predict movement trajectory and figure out who’s who. Rob Matheson from the MIT News Office has more details.
“Smart homes are still based on explicit input from apps or telling Alexa to do something. Ideally, we want homes to be more reactive to what we do, to adapt to us,” says Deepak Vasisht, a PhD student in MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) and lead author on a paper describing the system that was presented at last week’s Ubicomp conference. “If you enable location awareness and identification awareness for smart homes, you could do this automatically. Your home knows it’s you walking, and where you’re walking, and it can update itself.”
Experiments done in a two-bedroom apartment with four people and an office with nine people, over two weeks, showed the system can identify individuals with 96 percent and 94 percent accuracy, respectively, including when people weren’t carrying their smartphones or were in blocked areas.
But the system isn’t just novelty. Duet could potentially be used to recognize intruders or ensure visitors don’t enter private areas of your home. Moreover, Vasisht says, the system could capture behavioral-analytics insights for health care applications. Someone suffering from depression, for instance, may move around more or less, depending on how they’re feeling on any given day. Such information, collected over time, could be valuable for monitoring and treatment.
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