- Look around you,
you might not realize it,
but you likely already live in a smart home.
- Have a smart doorbell,
smart thermostat,
a smart baby monitor,
a smart sound machine—
smart assistants in every room.
Phones, that's right—
totally forgot about phones.
We rely on connectivity
for pretty much everything in our life.
We can't think about dead spots in our house.
- Smart homes have been promised
since the 1950s as a way to conquer drudgery,
but now that we technically live in them,
they don't feel very smart.
But as smart devices flood every inch of our spaces,
from light bulbs to even our toilets,
it's easy to see how homes can do more
than just conquer drudgery.
They can take care of us.
- The home that understands your habits.
- Being your assistant for your daily life.
- Smart spaces of the future is all about
creating this perfect harmony
where the network predicts what you want
rather than you having to tell the machines
what to do.
- We are on the verge
of a smart home evolution,
but the question is:
How do we get there?
This is a story about people creating
the smart technology
needed to build our future smart spaces.
- It's so beautiful.
Gwen, come here—
My name's Ben Rothwell.
I'm a dad of three,
and a husband.
I spent a lot of time doing
a lot of different things.
I'm the owner of Grounded Coffee,
I'm an adjunct professor for two different colleges,
and a pastor.
If we don't have connectivity,
people leave, and they leave reviews too.
So the necessity of being connected
is imperative for every aspect
of what I do.
- Wi-Fi underscores our lives,
but it's not actually very reliable.
It runs slow,
doesn't cover the whole house,
or cuts out entirely.
And as we acquire more and more smart devices,
this problem is only getting worse.
Nowadays, everything is smart,
but the Wi-Fi hasn't really kept up
with all these devices that are being added.
- Every device has a different need
from the network.
The chaos becomes bigger
because you can't talk to all the devices
at the same time.
- If we're going by Moore's Law,
by 2030, conservatively,
there will be 125 billion Wi-Fi devices
with an average of 50 in each home.
But with Wi-Fi's constant communication errors,
this seems unsustainable.
This brings us to our central question:
Do we adapt to the needs of our devices,
or do they adapt to our needs?
The first step was to solve the coverage issue
through what's called a 'mesh network.'
This is when you extend your router's reach
by placing nodes that are linked together
into separate rooms.
The message hops from node to node
to get to its destination,
and evenly divides the bandwidth
to all the devices.
- But it’s not solving the dynamic changing
of the environment.
- In order to solve this issue,
you need to give Wi-Fi a brain.
Plume did exactly that by creating Adaptive Wi-Fi.
- Let me show you the inside of the chamber.
The idea behind Adaptive Wi-Fi is learning
what is the device to prioritize,
so that will give a 360 measurement
of the device simulating in the real environment.
- Coffee maker, a doorbell,
a refrigerator—
it doesn't need as much bandwidth
as, let's say, your laptop.
And so, what Adaptive Wi-Fi does
is it learns.
- The first step
is installing software on all those mesh nodes
to collect information and data.
Next is to communicate that information
to a cloud, where it's analyzed
and applied to machine learning algorithms.
As it collects and stores data in real-time,
it sends results back into the home
as the environment changes
to control how the frequencies are distributed—
and as it collects more data,
it automatically adapts to your behaviors.
Let's say you have a family where everyone
is on their own device at the same time:
Adaptive Wi-Fi collects information
and learns that the kids need more bandwidth
for streaming their show in 4K,
and that mom needs less for sending emails—
but both would get the bandwidth they need.
In the future where everything is connected,
you can have dozens of devices
working simultaneously
like an orchestra,
and that just happens
without you even thinking about it.
- The smart space of the future
can be categorized in three buckets:
‘Personalization for IoT devices,’
if your coffee machine figures out
a very simple pattern to brew coffee
when you normally drink it.
You can let your imagination run loose
if you think about all the other possibilities.
The second category is ‘Energy.’
- Your home will learn where
and when you're using energy,
and optimize that distribution.
- Forgetting to turn off the lights or anything,
the system able to say "lights off,"
when nobody home.
- And the third category is ‘Personal Well-being.’
- Your home can know
that you're waking up later,
walking with a limp,
or using the bathroom more.
- Maybe your smart home is able to recognize that,
and then send an alert to one of your loved ones.
- The glitz of the future is on the horizon,
but for today, it's already showing promise
for people like Ben in a more practical way.
- About a year into the pandemic,
my wife's dad had a severe cardiac arrest.
Our house became this landing spot
for people to come and connect.
25 people sitting in this little space,
all huddled around tablets and laptops.
In the midst of probably the biggest trial
our family ever walked through—
I’m getting emotional again—
our family relied heavily
on the ability to be connected,
and I never once thought about
"Oh man, will my internet be able to do that?"
- Adaptive Wi-Fi's data-driven experiences
are in its nascent stages,
but it's clear that it's the foundation
of the future smart spaces we've been promised
for so long.
- Sorry, I'm just making sure
my two-year-old didn't wake up.
I'm actually using the Plume app right now
to see if my baby monitor disconnected.
Sorry, so what were you asking?
- Thanks for watching this video
made possible by Plume.
If you liked it, check out Freethink.com
for stories about people moving the world.