Butlr

San Francisco, CA

Butlr protects people's health and well-being during the coronavirus pandemic with a low-cost thermal imaging system that captures people’s behavior in indoor and outdoor environments. Butlr’s proprietary hardware pairs with advanced AI to gain insight into people’s movements in physical space, providing actionable intelligence to assisted living, homes, and public spaces, all while safeguarding privacy. Butlr is a spin-off from the MIT Media Lab. Butlr’s sensor network captures human dynamics through state-of-art sensory monitoring and AI, understanding users’ needs to achieve a seamless automation experience, preventing risk, and monitoring health. Responsive architecture is a vision of a future where the built environment is as customizable as a streaming music podcast, based on simple, intelligent architectural objects. The natural world is in a constant state of flux; combinations of moisture, breeze and temperature change continuously. When we are inside our buildings, however, our environment loses its dynamism, and we’re forced to constantly tweak the conditions to achieve optimal comfort. Responsive architecture uses intelligent objects to mirror the processes of the natural world, creating environments and “microclimates” that are suited to individuals or small groups based on the heat signature of their bodies. Today the team at Butlr uses small, low-cost sensors to track the motions and body heat of Each person has a biometric heat signature as unique as a fingerprint. The Butlr sensors recognize an individual’s heat signature, and can modify room temperature and lighting for ideal comfort. Unlike cameras that track and record faces, the Butlr system relies on a heat signature, which is unique, but cannot be used to trace your identity. Starting from home applications, the future vision for responsive architecture is to empower cities with networks of heat sensors that can make cities responsive, predicting and responding to vehicle flows, pedestrian density, and weather conditions on the fly. Using thermal data provides many news layers of interaction not possible with cameras.