 Virtual PEPCOM during virtual CES. I saw a very interesting home security product from a company called Origin Wireless. Dan Biogos, product manager at Origin Wireless promised to get geeky with me about their product and the technology behind it. Welcome to the show, Dan. Hi, Allison. Super happy to be here. All right. So all I've said so far to the audience here is that this has something to do with home security. Why don't you give us your start with your elevator pitch and then let's dig in. Got it. Okay. So Origin Wireless is the parent company of a product we call Hex Home. So Hex is a do-it-yourself home security product with an optional professional monitoring service. And it's unlike anything else today on the market with regards to security. And that's because Hex is a wave-based security system. So instead of using contact sensors and motion sensors that you place in all the corners and nooks and crannies of your home, Hex fills your home with Wi-Fi waves. And we do a little bit more there to figure out what's going on. So that's where we can get into it. But in general, the way it works is the Hex command will analyze how the waves change. Wait, what's a Hex command? Gotcha. Yeah. So here's a Hex command. And for those just listening, what I'm holding is a pod-shaped device, a little bit smaller than a hockey puck with rounded edges. It's white. And this would sit on a countertop or a table. And yeah, again, it's about three and a half, four inches in diameter. Maybe Amazon Echo size would be a good way to describe it. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. We'd like to think so. So the Hex command, do you plug that into your network? Exactly. So this will hook up to your home internet. And the other types of devices in the system are Hex sensors. So these are little wall plug-in devices that have a built-in siren and an LED light ring. So the way the system works is your command and your senses will talk to each other. And they will communicate using just regular Wi-Fi signals and fill your home with Wi-Fi. And the command is the brain of the system. So the command will analyze how the Wi-Fi waves are changing. And in turn, they can let you know when somebody has intruded. So isn't my house already filled with Wi-Fi waves? Yeah, that's right. Probably a lot. So how do you not have interference with other Wi-Fi that's in the room? Yeah. So just like when you add a new IoT device into your home, they will undergo a process called channel selection, where they'll figure out what channel in your Wi-Fi spectrum is best to communicate on. So because Hex uses standard Wi-Fi protocol, all of that kind of channel hopping is built in. And it won't cause any interference on your network. Just like any other IoT device you add, like an Echo or a Sonos speaker, for example. Okay. I guess I never thought of those as sending out Wi-Fi signals the way the command does. But I guess they must be, right, in order to be captured by the router and then sent on to the network. So the command is the name of the Hockey puck thing that connects into your network. And then what's the name for the little ones that go into the wall ports again? Sure. So that's the sense. Hex sense. Okay. So now let's talk about how you know what it is. How is this analyzing? How is the command analyzing the Wi-Fi waves that it gets back from the senses? Sure. So the way it works is we have software on the Hex command that does Wi-Fi analysis. We actually refer to it as wireless AI or wireless artificial intelligence. And the idea is we use what we call AI engines to interpret how the waves change. And this is where I'd like to talk a little bit about origin wireless, the Hex home parent company, and how that ties into things. Oh, okay. Yeah. Sure. So origin is a Wi-Fi sensing startup founded out of University of Maryland research. Our founder is a signal processing researcher. And in 2013, he had this breakthrough discovery where he realized that Wi-Fi waves can be used not only for communication, but for sensing purposes. So usually you use Wi-Fi to stream Netflix, but he actually discovered that by analyzing how the waves change, we can perform a whole bunch of different applications. So over the next few years, him and his research team developed what we call AI engines. So these are specific artificial intelligence engines that we trained to be able to understand what's going on in an environment. So origin has many different engines, but the one that we put onto Hex, we call our motion engine. And what this does is every second, and actually really 30 times per second, it's interpreting how the wave changes, and it's outputting what we call a motion statistic. And that's a 0-100 level of motion that describes how many of the waves are being disturbed and what kind of motion is going on in the home. Well, there's a big piece we sort of skipped here is the problem that this is solving is there's an intruder in your house. So it's going to detect that Sally the burglar is walking through my living room by disturbing those waves that have gone from the command of the sense and back. Exactly. So it's got to be working on the fact that bags of water humans disrupt radio waves, right? Yep. Yeah, that's how we do it. So when a human moves through Wi-Fi, because we're made of water, the signals will refract and bend in certain ways. And that's what we're measuring is those changes. And your the engine must be then have been taught how to tell what dog bags of water and cat bags of water, how they disturb it differently? Yep, exactly. So a pet will have a different kind of signature of movement. And we can recognize that signature and then filter it out. Okay, okay. So what really stood out to me with in the presentation that was done during PEPCOM was the it was actually the little video clip at the beginning that before you go into the room that explained the simplicity of this. I mean, you literally have this puck that's plugged into into your router or into your network and into power, and then these little plugs that go into your outlets. And there's no other stuff. I mean, that's all of it. And it's sensing motion can sense motion inside your home. Exactly. Yeah. So when we were building HEX, we wanted to solve the pain points of quote unquote, traditional security. So traditional security all uses some variation of the same hardware. Those are motion sensors or passive infrared sensors, contact sensors, a hub, a keypad. And it can be painful and difficult to set those up. All tiny things on every single window and door. I've got them everywhere. Got like, 47 of them. Yep. And they'll fall down if your house is humid, you know, the sticky tape will kind of degrade over time. They can kind of be an eyesore if they're in every corner. A lot of doors, you know, they don't actually work with because of the way the door in the frame is designed. So, you know, right, it's a real headache for the consumer. Yeah. And, you know, my husband and I are both engineers and geeky and mechanically inclined and all that kind of thing. But I always try to think of normal people who I guess spend, you know, $12,000 paying someone to put up all those little sensors, that kind of thing. Yeah. So with HEX, because it's a super simple do-it-yourself system, you know, it's basically plug and play, right? You plug in the three devices, you connect one to Wi-Fi, you're up and running. So we are skipping all the costs that come with an installer or, you know, all the extra hardware that comes with the system. So how many of these do you need in your home? Sure. So one starter kit comes with a command and two sensors. And that'll cover pretty much the standard home in America. So that's 1,500 square feet. I think the average home size in America is about 2,200 square feet. And you can think of that as kind of a first and second floor. So one HEX system will, you know, cover more than enough for a ground floor where really that's where you want to protect. And that's where you'll detect an intruder. Oh, that's a good point. I mean, you could put another, you could put more sensors upstairs, I suppose. But by that time, you already know that somebody's in your house. By the time they go upstairs, they've already, they by definition will have disturbed the waves downstairs. Yeah, we'll catch them as soon as they enter the door. So it's funny, my brain was going down the path of, well, I would need one of these sensors in every single room because it's got to be sensing the waves in each room. But the waves actually go through the walls, right? Exactly. Yeah. So we have something called nonline of sight sensing. And that's kind of like a research term. But basically, it means we don't need our sensor to be pointing at the thing it's trying to detect. So it will go through walls, you know, it will bend around couches and you can really place these things anywhere. The Wi-Fi signal will penetrate through it all. I mean, you probably wouldn't want to put all three in the same room. That would probably be a little dopey, right? You'd put the command in one room and then the two sensors in diagonal areas of the home, something like that. Yeah, you got it, Allison. That's exactly right. And that's what we recommend users to do is place them about one to two rooms apart, 15 to 30 feet or so. Keep your senses spread out in relation to your command. Okay. Now, I want to challenge you a little bit on one thing. Up front, you said that you're the only company doing anything like this, but there are a couple of router manufacturers who have built in something like this. I know Netgear, I forget what the other vendor was, but I think Netgear has something that uses Wi-Fi waves to sense people in your home. But you mean just a standalone thing that's different like that? Sure. So actually, you may be referring to Linksys. Did I say Netgear? Yeah, Linksys. Sorry. Right. So that was actually our first partner. So we worked with Linksys and we upgraded their routers to basically become sensors. Okay. Okay. That's pretty funny. I'm glad I asked that question because I've been hearing on other shows that people were saying, yeah, but, you know, Linksys already has this, but you guys are the guys that built it into the Linksys routers. That's very cool. Is there another network vendor, that networking company that has it? Yeah. So, yeah, I'll be transparent. One of our competitors is on the platform called Plume. So Plume pods also have, I believe, a motion sensing feature as well. Okay. Okay. I got you. All right. Well, that's good to know. I've heard of Plume, but Linksys is certainly a household word. So if you had to go with somebody, what advantage would there be of using it through your router? It would seem to me that's just adding an extra sense, right? Or is it command also? So the router deployment is a little different because that's for, really, it started with mesh routers. So we put our routers on mesh Wi-Fi devices, and then you kind of had a command as the router that's connected to really your internet with an ethernet cable, and then the other two mesh devices are your sensors. So you can see the same sort of architecture is forming there where you've got a command and sensors. And in the future, what you'll see is we can put our technology onto any standalone home router, not even a mesh system. And what we can do is use IoT devices, like EchoDots and Wi-Fi light bulbs. I got some examples here. So like a Phillips Wi-Fi light bulb that connects to your home router, we could use this as the same thing as a sense. So if you're kind of getting the idea, the router becomes, I got all these devices, but your home router will become your command and your light bulbs or anything else in your home will become your sensors. Oh man, I could really go nuts because I've got even more of those than I do of the little sensors on my windows. IoT stuff is littered everywhere. You would be totally covered, I'm sure. Very interesting, but this is such a, we should back away from the nerdy approach that most of my audience probably would do, but for normal people, if they want to have a simple security system without a bunch of faffing about with all these other devices, just putting in a command in two senses, they would have motion detection and know if somebody was in their home. Now you mentioned an LED and a siren. So you set a trigger for how sensitive it'll be for that, or how do you do that? Sure. So the LED on the senses is kind of like a nightlight feature. So that will light up if you're walking near a sense device. So it's kind of great for if you have a sense in your hallway and you're getting up in the middle of the night, it'll light up according to your motion. And then the siren will go off whenever there is a motion event. So that's a time when there's significant motion enough that we can conclude there is an intruder in your home. So your sensitivity level will change what we dictate is a motion event. So the higher your sensitivity, the more likely the emotion will be detected. Okay. So I'm assuming there's an app. Is there anything we need to know about the app? Or is it pretty much the obvious stuff? Set sensitivity, time of day? Is there geofencing? What kind of things do you have in the app? Sure. So the app has three system modes. So that's home, away, and vigilant. Home mode is pretty straightforward. You'll have that mode on when you and your family are safe and sound. Away mode is for when you want to lock your house down. So that will trigger your alarms if somebody intrudes. That's also pretty standard in security. Now, vigilant mode is unique to hex. And we're really excited for this feature because it allows you to keep an eye on things without triggering your siren. So if you just want to know that your kid's got home from school and it's 3pm or so, you can just get that notification without triggering a siren. And then another use case that some of our users have expressed interest in is using hex for the independent living kind of space or the older adult monitoring. So knowing that mom or dad is kind of safe in their home, moving from the living room to the kitchen, kind of going through their daily routines, we can have vigilant mode so that you can get alerts going, but you don't need to trigger an alarm or anything. That's a really interesting one. I'm very interested in the independent living ideas because I know a lot of companies are trying to look at that problem where how do you give the people who care deeply about those who need to be helped, the security and knowledge that their family member or friend is okay without it being creepy. Every solution I've seen is like, oh, that would totally work and no one would let them put that in their house. I know, let's put a camera in the bathroom, make sure they didn't fall. None of those ideas work. So I keep thinking of this being coupled with a camera. To me, if I saw motion, if I got motion detection from my sense or from my hex home, I would want to then see what it is. That would be my first instinct. Is that something you see coupling together? Or I mean, is that just what the user would have to choose to do? Sure. So you're one step ahead of us right now. That's absolutely something on our roadmap. The triggering of a camera kind of waking up when we detect motion. So one of the issues with those motion sensing cameras that use computer vision is they can be a little bit delayed. So you end up just kind of catching the tail end of somebody rushing by. Never once have I caught my mail carrier. I don't know how fast she is, but I've never seen her on my Ring Video Doorbell, not once in like three years. Right. Or if you do, it's just like them kind of running out the door at the very end of the steps or something. So we were looking to solve that problem because our motion detection will cover the whole home. So as soon as they enter the home, then we can wake the camera up and we'll get them as soon as they come into the picture instead of having all of that time that it takes for the camera to kind of calculate what it's seeing and then take a snapshot. Yeah, that's a good point. So they break in my back window or my back sliding glass door, for example, then they're in the house. There's time because they're in the house as you're waking those things up. That's interesting. Well, this is a really cool product. What's your pricing and delivery on this? Sure. So a hex home starter kit with a command in two senses will cost $179.99. And if you want to add an additional sense for a little more coverage, you can get that for $40. That's not bad. And are you shipping yet? So we're shipping in the summertime frame. So we're really looking forward to that. And that'll come with an optional professional monitoring service as well. Okay. Yeah, I saw that you were working on that. That's obviously something for people who definitely don't have their house covered in cameras or want to make sure there's some sort of alarm that triggers that. Well, this is very cool. If people want to learn more and look at the products, where would they go? Sure. So they can go to myhexhome.com where they'll have a complete overview of the product and they can get on a wait list. We'll also be launching a Kickstarter campaign, which they can be looking out for soon. And then if they want to learn more about the underlying technology in some of the other use cases, they can go to our parent company website, originwirelessai.com. If you Google origin wireless will come up for sure. Okay, for the underlying technology. Got it. Got it. Well, this has been very cool. Thank you so much for taking your time today, Dan. I really appreciate talking to you. I'm excited about this product. This is pretty interesting. I think this is an awesome idea. Thanks so much for having us on. I'm really excited too. It's been a pleasure.