Community driven appliance monitoring

How Crowdsourced Data is Improving Device Detection

Sense’s v18 iOS and Android update makes it easier for you to identify the devices in your home by leveraging the power of crowdsourcing.

Sense monitors have now been active in homes for over 3 years, and many more are coming online all the time. And with each monitor that’s installed, a new user joins the community of homeowners who are contributing critical user input into our device detection capabilities.

Crowdsourced energy intelligence

The new Community Names feature harnesses that user input and lets you see what other users have named devices with similar power signatures. Each name is accompanied by a percentage that roughly represents how many other Sense users have picked that device name. A device can be quickly renamed by either selecting it from this list or giving it a custom name. It can also be marked as a guess.

As you might imagine, the power of the community names feature to accurately recommend devices will continue to improve with user input. For example: if someone renames a generic "fridge” as a "wine fridge” (and even adds the make and model), this will help refine our models and detection, and improve the capabilities for the entire community.

You can read the release notes for this update, or get a walkthrough of the functionality with Sense product manager Hilario Coimbra.

 

Crowdsourcing ground truth data

The Sense integration with smart plugs from Wemo and TP-Link is also helping us crowdsource ground truth data that can help improve device identification across our entire community. Not only does this help add more device signatures to our repertoire, it gives us a rich set of data to test and improve our existing device models. If you're interested in learning more about how our device identification and appliance monitoring technology works, check out this blog post from our CEO, Mike Phillips, or enjoy this short video.