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“Ubiquitous sensors seem almost synonymous with the internet of things (IoT), but some Carnegie Mellon University researchers say ubiquitous sensing — with a single, general purpose sensor for each room — may be better. The plug-in sensor package they have developed monitors multiple phenomena — sounds, vibration, light, heat, electromagnetic noise, temperature, etc. — in a room. With some help from machine-learning techniques, this suite of sensors can determine whether a faucet’s left or right spigot is running, if the microwave door is open or how many paper towels have been dispensed. “The idea is you can plug this in and immediately turn a room into a smart environment,” said Gierad Laput, a Ph.D. student in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII). “You don’t have to go out and buy expensive smart appliances, which probably can’t talk to each other anyway, or attach sensors to everything you want to monitor, which can be hard to maintain as well as ugly. You just plug it into an outlet.” It is an approach that Laput and his co-investigators in HCII’s Future Interfaces Group call “Synthetic Sensors,” because the raw feeds from the unit’s nine sensors can be combined and interpreted in ways that can sense dozens of phenomena of interest. They presented their findings May 10 at CHI 2017, the Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, in Denver.”

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