How accurate are known devices? How does the sense team track this?

Technical Questions
1

I am curious how the team gets feedback about how accurate devices are reading. I assume you can see the same information we see for each home, however do you assume the data the monitor is reporting is always accurate. For example, if the Sense monitor tells me my vanity light is on, and I can clearly see it’s not, does the sense team know that? I would assume not. The reason I am asking is that every device the monitor has detected in my home has been inaccurate at some point. Some more the others and it seems the more devices I get (especially the big energy users) the more the monitor gets confused. I check the app a few random times a day but I see a lot of problems. I feel the accuracy of the data is a key component of making the sense a valuable tool.

Do you really want me to report every problem I see? Is that helpful?

I think more then all my devices being discovered I would rather have a few that were 100% accurate. Approximations have their limits.

2

@baallen12, we’re definitely aware that detected devices aren’t accurate 100% of the time. Device detection is very much still something our team is working hard on, both in expanding the number of devices that can be detected and improving the accuracy of those detected. Some detected devices (eg. microwaves), tend to be very reliable, while others (eg. low wattage lights) can be less so. This is something that factors into how our Data Science team prioritizes improvements.

In terms of reporting inconsistencies, right now you can report when a ‘device is not on’, by tapping ‘Report a problem’ at the bottom of a device’s page. This will send the data to our Data Science team to use to improve algorithms. We do plan to add additional functionality around this type of reporting as well.