SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Submitted via IRC for TheMightyBuzzard
Gierad Laput wants to make homes smarter without forcing you to buy a bunch of sensor-laden, Internet-connected appliances. Instead, he's come up with a way to combine a slew of sensors into a device about the size of a Saltine that plugs into a wall outlet and can monitor many things in the room, from a tea kettle to a paper towel dispenser.
Laput, a graduate student studying computer-human interaction at Carnegie Mellon University, built the gadget as part of a project he calls Synthetic Sensors. He says it could be used to do things like figure out how many paper towels you've got left, detect when someone enters or leaves a building, or keep an eye on an elderly family member (by tracking the person's typical routine via appliances, for example). It's being shown off this week in Denver at the CHI computer-human interaction conference.
[...] Laput says he and fellow researchers were curious to see if they could find a compact, capable alternative to existing smart gadgets, which can be costly and don't always play nice with each other, and wireless smart tags, which have to be stuck to various things around the house. They also wanted to see how much sensing they could do without a camera, which their research showed people found invasive.
Source: MIT Technology Review
(Score: 5, Insightful) by MostCynical on Sunday May 14 2017, @10:52PM (1 child)
we need to start using "smart" with quotation marks/inverted commas, or find a new word.
Smart used to be a simile for clever.
Wiring up your house to the interwebs and letting companies spy on you is anything but clever.
How about "surveillance sensors"?
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 15 2017, @12:50AM
In their defense, they don't mean smart as in clever, they mean smart as in well dressed. And most of them are at least somewhat aesthetically pleasing.