Watch out for that vacuum cleaner!

The Roomba vacuum cleaner constantly maps your house to get smarter in its cleaning cycles… That may turn out to have unexpected consequences… Image Credit: iRobot

It is no news at all that data are important and that we are flooded by data. Actually, it is exactly because it is no news that the ever increasing sources of data fall below our perception and that is a problem. Take something like a vacuum cleaner. The Roomba, manufactured by iRobot.

To do its job it keeps harvesting data about your house, so that it can optimise its cleaning paths, avoid bumping in objets and so on. Well, all these data can be leveraged to know something about your house. The information on how much “empty space” you have in your living room, the fact that there would be space for an additional couch or that your couch is getting old and starts to wear out can trigger a targeted ads from Amazon to propose you exactly that, may be providing you with a proposal for changing the arrangement of your furniture.

Using an App you can communicate with your vacuum cleaner and see the progress in cleaning, right on a map of your home that Roomba keeps updating. Credit: iRobot

Roomba is equipped with sensors and with an on board AI software that “understand” the lay of the land, so to say. Notice that one of this sensor is a digital camera and the AI software recognises the object it is seeing, like a couch and a chair. This allows Roomba to create a map of your home and you can see that map, and the cleaning progress, on your smart phone.

Roomba AI recognises objects “seen” by the digital camera and uses this information to plan the optimal cleaning strategy as well as to finely tune vacuum power, like increasing it when cleaning a carpet… Credit: iRobot

Actually, the map shown on your phone is a “summary” of the data gathered by Roomba, which are quite more extensive.

iRobot has been thinking about the value of the data its Roomba cleaners keep harvesting and has thought about selling them. At least, this is what they announced in an interview of its CEO Colin Angle gave to Reuter. Given the image recognition capability and the photo capturing an application in the cloud would be able to tell what furniture model you have. Additionally, since these data are continuously updated this application can also detect when you change something, add something, even move something around.

As one could have expected this statement raised quite some concerns and now iRobot is backtracking ensuring its customers it will never sell their data. As you know, never say never…

On the other hand it is obvious that releasing these data might result in an increased service to you. This robot is actually digitising your home, creating a digital twin that you can use when shopping around or when in need for maintenance. You will have a model of your home in your smartphone, constantly updated, you might even use it to look for that Lego brick that has gone missing and thanks to Roomba it could be spotted under the couch.

As with every technology, the implications are always varied, the coin has always two sides. The one used by marketing where all is nice and great, and the one you are never told that may present some downside. Deciding out big these are for you it is of course for you … to decide. The problem is that most of the time we are not aware of these downside.

I, for one, would have never considered I would have to watch out for my vacuum cleaner!

About Roberto Saracco

Roberto Saracco fell in love with technology and its implications long time ago. His background is in math and computer science. Until April 2017 he led the EIT Digital Italian Node and then was head of the Industrial Doctoral School of EIT Digital up to September 2018. Previously, up to December 2011 he was the Director of the Telecom Italia Future Centre in Venice, looking at the interplay of technology evolution, economics and society. At the turn of the century he led a World Bank-Infodev project to stimulate entrepreneurship in Latin America. He is a senior member of IEEE where he leads the New Initiative Committee and co-chairs the Digital Reality Initiative. He is a member of the IEEE in 2050 Ad Hoc Committee. He teaches a Master course on Technology Forecasting and Market impact at the University of Trento. He has published over 100 papers in journals and magazines and 14 books.