Intellithings, the Israeli startup responsible for the RoomMe intelligent room presence monitoring system, has integrated support for IFTTT – including an IFTTT action that provides users with trigger-driven occupancy reports – and Hubitat, the DIY smart home hub.
The ultimate goal of every smart home ecosystem is to not only know where every family member is in a home. For privacy, the smart home system doesn’t need to know what a person is doing, just where they are. Armed with this information a smart home processor/hub can, for example:
- Turn lights specific lights on in a room when a person enters based on the activities they typically perform. Different lighting scenes could even be activated based on time of day or previous actions the person has taken.
- Turn lights off in a room when it isn’t occupied.
- Adjust the temperature in a room based on a person’s personal preference.
- Set back heating / cooling in areas of a home that aren’t occupied.
- Automatically play a person’s preferred music when they enter a room or allow a person’s music to follow them from room to room.
- Turn off music in rooms that aren’t occupied
RoomMe by Intellithings can do all this and more. RoomMe tracks the movement of people in a home through their smart phones or watches making a Bluetooth connection to RoomMe sensors that are mounted on the ceiling at the entry / exit points of each room in a home.
I wrote in detail about RoomMe back in December. You can find the review I wrote here.
According to Intellithings, RoomMe integrates with a long list of platforms including:
- Apple HomeKit
- Bose
- Control4
- Crestron
- Ecobee
- ELAN
- Harmony
- hub-connected Z-Wave and Zigbee devices
- Insteon
- LIFX
- Logitech
- Philips HUE
- RTI
- Sensibo,
- Sonos
- URC
- Wink
Intellithings has just made two important additions to this list adding integration with Hubitat and IFTTT.
Hubitat is my favorite DIY smart home hub. Unlike many competing products, all smart home processing takes place locally on the hub, not in the cloud. So, when a homeowner inevitably encounters an internet outage, their smart home doesn’t suddenly become dumb. Instead it will continue operating normally with the exception of any peripheral devices that it is forced to communicate with through a cloud service. The hub is easy to use and has a very active community hosted on the Hubitat website that is very willing to help out new users.
IFTTT has become the duct tape of integration. It allows anyone, even people with limited computer knowledge, to integrate smart home products with different smart home platforms. An IFTTT applet can simply be triggered when a person defined within the RoomMe app either enters or exits any room with RoomMe sensors. This provides the same functionality as any of the direct integrations with smart home platforms that Intellithings has developed in the past.
RoomMe sensors are available for $99 each through Amazon. Individually this isn’t expensive. But, it is important to understand that sensors need to be mounted at all the entrances of the rooms where you want to monitor occupancy. Bedrooms typically only have a single entrance. However, a living room, dining room, and kitchen can each have multiple entrances, so the cost of outfitting a home with RoomMe sensors can quickly add up.
On the other hand, RoomMe can bring you as close as possible to a home that goes beyond being just smart and becomes almost sentient in its ability to act upon your needs as you move around your home. For some people, that makes it more than worth the price.
To download the most recent version of the RoomMe app for iOS click here.
To download the most recent version of the RoomMe app for Android, click here.
For more information on Intellithings, RoomMe, or how to become a dealer visit www.intellithings.net
