Philips Hue’s motion sensing trick could eventually get better | usagoldmines.com

The just-released “pro” version of Philips Hue’s smart hub comes with a killer feature: the ability to turn your Hue lights into motion detectors. But as I noted after testing the Bridge Pro last month, Hue’s motion-sensing functionality is missing a key feature. 

Specifically, Hue’s new MotionAware system is pretty good at detecting movement, but it can’t sense when a room is simply being occupied by someone.  

The ability to detect presence as well as motion in a room would be the “next step” for Hue, company founder and technology chief George Yanni has acknowledged, although it’s not clear exactly when Philips Hue might actually take that next step. 

“We, in theory, can sense more sophisticated things than just motion,” Yanni said in a recent interview with HomeKit Insider (via HueBlog.com). “The next step would be presence, and maybe in the future, we work out how to sense more things.” 

But Yanni also sounded a word of caution, noting that Hue wouldn’t roll out a new feature like presence sensing “until we’re sure it’s reliable,” adding that “we have quite a high-quality experience bar to break.” 

As it stands, the Hue’s MotionAware system enables three or more Hue lights in a room to detect movement by tracking disruptions in the Zigbee radio signals that connect the bulbs to the hub and each other.  

When the Zigbee field in a user-designated motion zone is disturbed, boom: motion detected, an event that can trigger an event like enabling a lighting scene. Conversely, if MotionAware doesn’t detect motion for a set period of time, it can trigger another event, such as turning off the lights in a given room. 

But while Hue’s MotionAware feature is pretty good at detecting motion, it’s not so great at presence sensing—that is, detecting that someone is present but sitting still in a motion zone. During my testing, for example, MotionAware would turn my kitchen lights on when I entered the room, but if I sat down and started eating lunch, it would eventually turn the lights off while I was still eating—not a great experience. 

Presence sensing isn’t as important when it comes to security cameras and video doorbells, in which case you mainly want to know if someone’s creeping around your front yard or leaving a package at your door. But occupancy detection is key when it comes to ensuring your dining room lights don’t turn off in the middle of a meal. 

To be fair, most other motion detectors have the same issue, which is why there’s a separate category of presence detectors—or devices that use a variety of methods (from passive infrared sensors and ultrasonic sensors to RGB cameras and CO2 detectors) to sense whether someone is in a room, moving or not. 

From Yanni’s interview, it certainly sounds like adding presence sensing to MotionAware’s bag of tricks is a possibility, as well as a major opportunity for Hue.

“Because you have lights in every room of your house…we’re the perfect category to roll out room-level presence sensing to a home,” Yanni said during the HomeKit Insider podcast.  

“There’s no other real product category that can do that, right? Everything else, you have to add a dedicated sensing device,” Yanni continued. “So I think we have an exciting role to play to make technologies like MotionAware part of the sensing fabric of our homes.” 

This story is part of TechHive’s in-depth coverage of the best smart lights.