Context - Using old smartphones as stationary IoT devices

Overview: Turning sensors into signals for human consumption.

Use existing hardware like old smartphones.
Use built-in sensors to passively derive as much meaning from ambient information as possible.
Privacy: eg, not recording voice, just presence/absence of sound.

Use-Cases

No sound for 2hrs, something is wrong. Mom had a heart attack.
While traveling, get notification of power outage at home.
While at work, get notification of "Joe's iPhone" in the house. WTF.
Getting dark and no people are around, so turn the lights off.
How am I sleeping? Analyse relative noise/motion.
You haven't left the house in 5 days (Genevieve Bell)

Usage

There's no UI for this yet.

Example code for listening to a sensor and taking action based on it.

// Notify me when the power goes out.

var trigger = {
  source: 'source-power',
  signal: 'batteryCharging',
  value: false // trigger when the value for batteryCharging changes to false
};

var notification = {
  title: 'Power Outage',
  description: 'The power went out!'
};

registerTrigger([matcher], [], [notification]);

// Take a picture and send it to me when a new Bluetooth device is detected.

var trigger = {
  source: 'source-bluetooth-devices',
  signal: 'bluetoothDevice'
};

var action = {
  id: 'takePicture',
  timeout: 1000
};

var notification = {
  title: 'New Bluetooth Device',
  description: 'New Bluetooth device detected.'
};

registerTrigger(matcher, action, notification);

Concepts

Sources & Signals

Hardware capabilities are 'sources', eg Wifi.
Sources can emit multiple signals, eg 'current wifi connection lost', 'new wifi network found'
Properties:
** sourceId (string), eg 'bluetooth'
** sourceLabel (string), eg 'Bluetooth'
** sourceIcon (string URL)
** signalId: (string), eg 'newdevice'
** signalLabel (string): Readable description
** signalIcon (string URL)
** type (string), 'scalar' or 'stream'
** value (anything)

Triggers

Triggers match signal events and configures notifications in response.
Can assign notifications per trigger for each criticality level
Properties:
** events (array), Array of event matcher objects
** actions (array), Array of actions
** notifications (array), Array of notifications

Event Matching Triggers

An object that configures how a trigger matches against a signal
Properties:
** sourceId (string, reqd), id of source
** signalId (string, reqd), id of signal
** value: (mixed, opt), Unsure yet. Regex? Matching function? How to handle streams? Percent change?
** criticality (int, 1-3, reqd), the criticality resulting from a match

Notifications

Properties:
** title
** description
** icon
** criticality (int, 1-3)
** data

Actions

actions to take based on a trigger match
TODO results are included in notifications somehow
** actionId (string), eg 'takePicture'
** actionLabel (string), eg 'Take picture'
** actionIcon (string URL), URL of icon
** actionOutput
action request
** actionId
** timeout

Contributing

TODO

Implement broad classifications:

home vs away vs asleep
people present - active or not
relative noisiness
a person is in my house (bluetooth, sound, speech)
a person has arrived
a person has departed
how many people are around
detect a cat, dog, bird

V1 TODO

set up some default triggers: power, camera, sound
trigger support for cache in matches (eg: new bluetooth device, compared to if ever found)
triggers for any value change (eg, true/false in batteryCharging - you want to know when the power goes back on)
fix tests (use default triggers?)
datastorage should be in signal?
notification system: expand to use plugins
rewrite ui render using triggers?
fix sound variable cache length
fix stream data scaling
persist data (have viz pull from persistent cache?)
settings UI for ifttt maker channel
settings UI integration for trigger/notification
check notifications config against web notification spec
list unsupported sensors (output to console?)
generated docs from sources

V2 TODO

storage infra (pouchdb)
store module logs
action system (takePicture, recordSound, saySomething, webRequest, beep,
move everything to a worker?
Connect listener devices via NFC, which installs app and registers for push notifications