Interesting tech but it's not clear to me what problem this solves. As is touched on at the end of the article, it's not like there is a lack of sensors that could be used to detect intruders. The main issue for a lot of people is that, in order to take useful action when you're not at home, you need some sort of security service which is a monthly fee and can get expensive.
Depending on the accuracy of it, it could be a fantastic solution to do room-by-room presentence detection in a much more consistent way than other solutions (like infrared motion detection), and with much less of an impact on privacy in the worst case (a video-stream person-detection algorithm will "leak" full video of your house if hacked, this will "leak" your approximate location), and it can do all of this with a single unit compared to a unit for each room with other solutions.
One thing i've wanted since I started doing home-automation stuff is a system that can turn off lights after someone has been out of the room for like 10-15 minutes. IR sensors have false readings a lot (if you are sitting still reading a book, suddenly the lights go out...), not to mention the need for a sensor in each room with good visual coverage of the whole room.
Something like this would be fantastic for that use case, and knowing if someone was home when they aren't supposed to be is just an added bonus.
And you don't need a security service to take action, a neighbor can check if needed, or if you are certain that something is wrong, a call to the police.
One thing i've wanted since I started doing home-automation stuff is a system that can turn off lights after someone has been out of the room for like 10-15 minutes.
The thing is I don't want to have to get a device per room and have to place it in a location that has good visibility of a good portion of the room.
Not to mention you are talking about a bunch of processing which needs to be correct 100% of the time, and it's using cameras so if a hack or "leak" were to happen, there's full video of the inside of my house and my family at stake (something i'm not quite willing to risk yet).
I'm also going to throw a system out if it turns the lights out on me when i cover myself up with a blanket on the couch.
However, I strongly agree here (about the blanket on the couch).
The perfect system should be able to do both 1) passive device-free detection as well as 2) inferring information about your location of any personal device.
To have a device in every room is no problem for me. As long as it is invisible and cheap.
As a side mini-rant, the Starbucks I used to go to had energy-saving motion sensitive light switches in the bathrooms. Walk in, lights turn on, after some idle period they shut back off.
Except the timer interval was way too short. If I'm taking a long shit, sure, I can deal with a slight inconvenience of having to wave my arm to get more light... But if I'm standing there and peeing, and the lights turn off, that's a pretty serious bug!
This is why for the toilet case they are coupled with auto flushers that fire too easily when you lean forward or backwards slightly - it keeps the user standing up suddenly to avoid the splash at intervals small enough to keep the lights on.
Apparently they couldn't figure out an equivalent invention for the standing-urination case, especially since hand sink sensors don't even trigger when you wave your hands entirely over them several times and so most certainly couldn't be used here in the case of the less endowed gentleman...
And that's the exact reason why I hate current solutions for this kind of thing.
When I was younger, we had a motion sensing light switch in my bedroom (because I was a little shit that never turned my lights off). It used to infuriate me because if I rolled over too much at night, the light would go on. If we messed with it to the point that it didn't happen any more, it would turn off when i'm just sitting there reading or something.
Something that could determine where you are not by motion but by the fact that you are a large bag of water would be much more accurate and could basically stop the "lights randomly going off at the worst time" issues.
I have a few "smarthome" type devices but mostly I'm fine with just using light switches and otherwise manual controls. I live more or less in the country in a safe area so I'm not really concerned about someone breaking in when I'm here and neighbors wouldn't necessarily hear an alarm.
I'm not going to say it's "revolutionary" or anything, but it's really really nice to have.
I started out the same as you, the only reason I wanted some of this stuff was so I could turn out the lights when I forgot to, or be able to turn the light off after i'm in bed.
Then it expanded a LOT once I started getting used to it. The system is fully local, and one of my biggest rules is that the system must work manually 100% of the time without fail regardless of whether the "hub" is working or not.
Our light switches work identically to before, they are the traditional up-down toggle flippy switches. But now they go into a z-wave enabled box that proxies them to the real circuit, and that z-wave box can be controlled by the hub.
And it enabled some really nice quality-of-life improvements (even if they are individually all pretty small). Things like turning on the hallway lights when you come home and it's after dark, things like turning off the lights automatically when we all are out of the house. Things like having a button on my bedside table that when hit turns every light in the house off, makes sure the front door is locked, makes sure the garage is closed, and turns off all the TVs. Things like a notification if my wife leaves her hair-straightener plugged in and nobody is home, with an option to turn that outlet off remotely right there in the notification.
We still use our light switches "manually" 90% of the time, but we have found that we now stop turning lights off as one of the other systems will turn it off for us. And while it's not "life changing", it's kind of nice to know you can pick up your drink and dish and take it outside without having to turn the light off as you can just yell to the voice-recognition part to turn it off for you.
Being able to step that system up with something that can intelligently do some of those steps for me without ever being wrong and without tons of intrusive or ugly sensors would be just another benefit.
At a glance, it seems way more useful 'offensively'.
Most systems are installed inside a home, and track entry and exit. That works great if you own the home and start from an empty state (so everything is fine unless someone enters).
But if you don't control the building, or don't know who's inside to start out, then most existing systems fail. Which means Aura seems like a breakthrough specifically for surveilling locations you don't have full ownership of, like someone else's house or a neighboring apartment. Which is a bit disconcerting.
