For years I’ve wanted to be able to look at a light switch, say “On”, and have the lights switch on. This kind of interface sounds simple, so why doesn’t it exist? It turns out building one requires solving a lot of tough research and engineering challenges, and even more daunting, coming up with a whole new business model for smart devices. Despite these obstacles, I’m so excited about the possibilities that I’ve founded a new startup, Useful Sensors, together with a wonderful team and great investors!

We’ve been operating in stealth for the last few months, but now we’ve launched our first product, a Person Sensor that is available on SparkFun for $10. This is a small hardware module that detects nearby faces, and returns information about how many there are, where they are relative to the device, and performs facial recognition. It connects over I2C, and so is easy to integrate with almost any microcontroller, but is also designed with privacy built in. If you’ve followed my work on ML sensors, this is our attempt to come up with the first commercial application of this approach to system design.

We’ve started to see interest from some TV and laptop companies, especially around our upcoming hand gesture recognition, so if you are in the consumer electronics world, or have other applications in mind, I would love to hear from you!

Now we’re public, you can expect to see more posts here in the future going into more detail, but for now I’ll leave you with some articles from a couple of journalists who have a lot of experience in this area. I thought they both had very sharp and insightful questions about what we’re doing, and had me thinking hard, so I hope you enjoy their perspectives too:

Pete Warden’s Startup puts AI in the Sensor, by Sally Ward-Foxton

Former Googler creates TinyML Startup, by Stacey Higginbotham