Why the Doorway is a Data Portal into Multi-Person Homes

  • Kamin Whitehouse | UC Berkeley

90% of the US population lives in a shared dwelling with at least one other person. “Smart home” sensors today can monitor the house as a whole, but it remains an open challenge to monitor the activities or energy usage of a given individual in a multi-person household. Today’s elderly monitoring systems, for example, cannot tell which occupant is cooking, bathing, or accessing the medicine cabinet.
In this talk, I’ll explain how sensing the doorway alone can be sufficient to monitor individual people in a multi-person home, thereby avoiding the need to track people with cameras, microphones, or wearable tags. As an example, I’ll describe our “Doorjamb” sensing system that can detect who is in the home, the room location of each person, and which water and electrical fixtures they are using. Our current prototype of this sensor is designed to be snapped in place behind the doorjamb to hide architecturally, and the system can be installed by non-technical home owners because it configures itself. I will also describe how the system can be used to save energy in the home through intelligent heating, cooling, lighting, and water heating

Speaker Details

Kamin Whitehouse works in the areas of wireless sensor networks, with a focus on intelligent buildings. He is an associate professor in the Computer Science Department at the University of Virginia, is a Siebel scholar, and was awarded NSF CAREER award. He earned his BA and BS from Rutgers University and his MS and Ph.D. from UC Berkeley..

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      Jeff Running

Series: Microsoft Research Talks