Zensors

Adaptive, Rapidly Deployable, Human-Intelligent Sensor Feeds

Abstract

The promise of “smart” homes, workplaces, schools, and other environments has long been championed. Unattractive, however, has been the cost to run wires and install sensors. More critically, raw sensor data tends not to align with the types of questions humans wish to ask, e.g., do I need to restock my pantry? In response, we built Zensors, a new sensing approach that fuses real-time human intelligence from online crowd workers with automatic approaches to provide robust, adaptive, and readily deployable intelligent sensors. With Zensors, users can go from question to live sensor feed in less than 60 seconds. Through our API, Zensors can enable a variety of rich end-user applications and moves us closer to the vision of responsive, intelligent environments. Published at CHI 2015.

FULL CITATION

Gierad Laput, Walter S. Lasecki, Jason Wiese, Robert Xiao, Jeffrey P. Bigham, and Chris Harrison. 2015. Zensors: Adaptive, Rapidly Deployable, Human-Intelligent Sensor Feeds. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 1935-1944. DOI=http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702416