Connected cameras might be the current darlings of the smart home, but what if a 24/7 stream from inside your house gives you the privacy shivers? A smarter motion sensor might be the answer, with Aura promising a new way to track activity in the home – as well as automate it – based on wireless activity.
Traditional movement sensors rely on factors like heat or light, which tend to be fairly blunt in their ability to differentiate what’s going on in the room. More recently, we’ve seen cameras with machine learning – like Amazon’s recent Cloud Cam, or Nest’s Cam IQ – doing something similar but with more refinement, promising the ability to spot people but ignore the motion of, say, a breeze blowing the curtains.
The downside there is that you have a camera pointing into your home, and generally all your video data being hosted on a remote server somewhere in the cloud. The Aura sensors tackle things differently. Plugged into an outlet, they use “WiFi Motion”: effectively, they monitor the disruption of wireless signals that are caused when people move around through them.
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