The problem with motion as a trigger
I’m trying to automate as many actions as possible to remove the need to think or act in order to control accessories. I’ve steered away from voice control, primarily because the latency is too high (you can read more on that here). For me, the goal is when things happen automatically, as if by magic.
To achieve this type of automation, I’ve started by using various Philips Hue motion sensors paired with HomeBridge and a couple of DLink Omna cameras to trigger motion based automations for turning lights on and off. I’ve currently got the following setup:
- Kitchen accent lights (Hue lightstrips) automatically turn on after 6pm (and if the light level isn’t too bright), and off again after 5 minutes if no further motion is detected.
- Bedroom accent lights turn on between 10pm and 6am if motion is detected, and then off again after 1 minute if no motion is detected (to create a night light and avoid stumbling around in the dark).
- Hall spotlights turn on with a hue that matches the time of day (based on the light level) and turns off after 1 minute if no motion is detected.
- Nursery light turns on (dimmed) if motion is detected by the camera between 5am and 8am.
This setup works, but isn’t perfect, mainly because:
- If a room is occupied but there’s no or very little movement (i.e. if watching the TV or washing up), the lights turn off. This results in me having to periodically move around, or disable the ‘off’ action in the Hue app.
- Motion is detected, but there’s no way of knowing what or who triggered it (i.e. one the cats having a prowl around).
- It’s not possible to tell if the room was already occupied when the motion was detected.
- There’s no easy way to infer the direction of travel through the house.
It seems then that there’s a huge gap in the market for some kind of smart sensor that forms a mesh with surrounding sensors that’s able to understand how people are moving around a dwelling. My ideal feature list would:
- Know who is in which room of the house, without relying on any other tech (watch, phone etc).
- Be able to learn the movement patterns of inhabitants so that the system is smart enough to understand somebody turning over in bed, vs getting up out of bed.
- Understand which rooms are occupied, and be able to understand the difference between popping in and out of rooms and completely vacating a room.
- Be able to identify and predict a route based on sensors being triggered in sequence.
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