Apologies for the radio silence, this update is long overdue. As many of you have noticed, Hiome has been out of stock for nearly 2 years. Unfortunately there are currently no plans to restock Hiome again.

I first started working on Hiome in 2017 when I became frustrated with the state of smart home automation. Once we started shipping in 2019, Hiome was the best occupancy sensor on the market and our customers loved them. Surprisingly, the market has barely changed since then.

As sales were ramping up and we were getting ready to scale to meet demand, the pandemic hit in 2020. Hiome relies on an IR thermopile array sensor to detect your heat signature. Suddenly this and other components were in high demand, driving the cost of our sensors up astronomically and dragging wait times for parts out 6-12 months. As an early stage business, this was unsustainable, and we eventually disbanded the team to do other things.

We really appreciate all the support and interest from the community, and regret we couldn’t help bring more homes into the future. This was an exciting experience, and I’m proud of what we built. I hope that one day everyone can experience effortless smart homes that just work.

What will happen to existing Hiome users?

All existing Hiome installations will keep working as they have. We built Hiome from the ground up with privacy in mind, meaning it has zero cloud dependencies and your home is not impacted by what we do or don’t do. However, we are unable to provide further customer support or software updates.

Can you recommend an alternative to Hiome?

Honestly, not really. While Hiome wasn’t perfect, I have yet to find something better. Aqara is working on new mmWave occupancy sensors that look promising, but they are currently only available in China as of this writing so I haven’t personally tried them. They recently announced the FP2 which should be available globally later this year. Hopefully that can fill the gap left by Hiome.

Why don’t you work on Hiome again now that supply chains have normalized?

Good question. Admittedly this is partially why this status update has taken so long to publish. However, we ultimately had to accept that after this much time, we’re all in different places in our lives. Jumping back into the tumultuous fire that is a hardware startup is not a decision taken lightly. We may still return to Hiome eventually, but it’s not going to happen in the foreseeable future.

Can I work on Hiome?

Possibly! A couple companies have reached out to discuss acquisition of the IP. After some conversations, we decided those weren’t good fits, but in principle, we are open to the idea. If you think you’d be a good fit to run the business or can purchase the IP at a fair price, we’re open to chatting.

Will you open source Hiome?

This is something I’ve strongly considered. I’d love to help the community build DIY sensors, but Hiome involves a lot of parts. Open sourcing and documenting all of it in a useful format, while also building a community and managing contributions, is a significant committment that I’m not sure I can make right now. Having said that, if you’re interested in helping build an open source version of Hiome, please join us on Guilded and I’ll reconsider if there’s enough demand.

How can I stay notified if you change your mind or build something else?

Thanks for the interest! As much as I’m unsure about Twitter’s future, it is currently still the best way to broadcast updates, so you can follow @hiomeai or @neilgupta for the latest news. We’ll also post updates here if anything changes.

Please feel free to reach out with any questions or concerns you may have.

We believe privacy is a human right, and it’s central to everything we build. Hiome is designed from the ground up to be private by design.

Hiome Core keeps all of your data local within your home. No cloud dependency means your data is safe, your sensors are fast, and everything keeps working even if your internet connection goes down. To accomplish this, we invested significant resources rebuilding a lot of the building blocks of cloud infrastructure inside your home.

To keep placing our money where our mouth is, we’ve also dropped Google Analytics from hiome.com in the interest of your privacy! Just like your data shouldn’t be exfiltrated from your home, we also think it’s wrong to be tracked around the web with cookies. You have a right to privacy everywhere, and we intend to honor that.

Google Analytics is the most popular analytics platform because it’s free. Instead of charging businesses, Google aggregates your data to keep learning more about your browsing habits. Essentially, you’re paying for sites to use Google Analytics with your privacy, and getting nothing in return.

Instead, we’ve switched to Plausible, a much simpler and more privacy-friendly analytics solution with a straightforward business model: they charge us money. As a business, we don’t need to know every little thing about you, but we do need to know if people are visiting us at all so that we can measure our conversion rate. To that end, the only data we look at are total visitors, referrals, and your device type (e.g., mobile, tablet, laptop, or desktop). That’s it. We don’t use any cookies, so you’re not tracked around the web. Instead, it just gives us a general idea of how well we’re doing.

What you do in your home is your business, and it should not be monetized or weaponized. You shouldn’t have to decide whether it’s worth trading privacy for convenience. Those same values apply when you’re browsing our website.

As Ben Franklin said, “Those who would give up essential privacy to purchase a smart home, deserve neither privacy nor a smart home,” or something like that. We won’t let you down, Ben.

Occupancy detection is a surprisingly difficult problem. Unless you’ve tried to solve it yourself, you may not realize why so many have struggled. Let’s talk about why.

As humans, we’re constantly observing what’s happening around us, thinking about it, and then reacting to that stimulus. For example, if you see a tomato flying towards you, you’ll process what’s happening and then react by ducking. A smart home is no different. All intelligent systems must see, think, and act in that order. Current smart home systems are heavily optimized on acting: turn the lights on, change the temperature, or unlock the door. We still have to see that it’s too dark and ask our home to do something for us.

In order to truly automate this workflow, we need the home to see that we’re in the dark first. A lux sensor can tell the system that it’s dark, but we don’t want the lights to turn on for an empty room. How does your home know someone is there?

Enter the humble motion sensor.

Motion sensors have been around for decades. They use passive infrared (PIR) to detect large changes in heat across their field of view. This works very well for detecting when somebody moves, and uses surprisingly little power, so they can last on tiny batteries for over a year.

You can usually recognize them by their round fresnel lens.

Detecting motion to determine occupancy makes sense on paper, but quickly falls apart in the real world. For example, if you’re standing still, the sensor will lose track of you. It’s impossible to know if you’re still in the room or not, which is why all motion sensors use a timer to reset themselves if no motion is detected for some amount of time. If you’ve ever had to wildly wave your arms around to turn the lights back on in an office or bathroom, you’ve experienced the limitation of this approach. It’s even worse in the bedroom, where the lights will turn on the middle of the night if you toss over. On the flip side, the sensor has to wait until the timer runs out to be sure the room is empty after you leave, creating a lag in your home’s responsiveness.

Track people with cameras.

If the issue is lack of object permanence, let’s use cameras to track people. They can see exactly what’s happening, and machine vision algorithms have gotten good enough to accurately identify humans in a video, solving a lot of the false positive issues.

Unfortunately, this comes at a significant cost to privacy. Few people want a camera watching them sleep or shower. Cameras also lose track of you the moment you walk out of their field of view.

Track your phone’s location.

Hopefully by now, you’re seeing that tracking humans is not easy. That’s why a lot of people resort to tracking your phone instead. Bluetooth (BLE) or Ultra Wideband (UWB) beacons ping your phone, telling it where you are based on the closest beacon. This approach is persistent and protects your privacy!

But what happens if you leave your phone on the charger? Unfortunately, the system falls apart because it’s only able to track your phone, not you. It also doesn’t work for guests or kids who may not have smartphones.

Hire a bouncer.

By now, we’ve seen how motion is not the same thing as occupancy, cameras sacrifice too much privacy, and anything that tracks your phone will eventually fail. If only we could have a bouncer at the door who just told us how many people are in the room…

Well, we can! We can count entries and exits into a room to know how many people are still in the room without ever seeing the room itself.

This is the approach we took with Hiome Door. It’s the first sensor for your home that can count entries and exits to know the final occupancy state of your room. Hiome works for everyone, including guests and kids, even if you’re not carrying anything. And it enables your home to react to you in milliseconds!

To protect privacy even more, we didn’t stop there. We also used a thermal sensor to detect heat signatures instead of a camera so that your privacy is protected even in the doorway. Second, we built Hiome with absolutely zero cloud components, so your data stays within your home.

Having a good sensor is just the first step in building a truly intelligent home, but it is a crucial one to get right. If you can’t see what’s happening, it’s very difficult to react appropriately.