Aqara's Matter-compatible camera promises easier smart home integration The company says it's the first Matter-certified camera. Smart home company Aqara has launched what it says is the first camera certified for Matter, the open source standard that enables interoperability across brands, like Google and Amazon. The Aqara G350 is an indoor security cam that also functions as a Zigbee and Matter hub in the Aqara Home app, which means the camera will enable you to control various devices across smart home protocols from different brands within one location. The camera itself comes with a 4K wide-angle and a 2.5K telephoto lens, providing both panoramic and closeup views. It also has 9x hybrid zoom and a pan-tilt mechanism that can give you 360-degree coverage of the room it's in.

However, existing solutions which mainly rely on cameras and wearable devices are either privacy intrusive or inconvenient to use.

Apple is mandating users upgrade to its new Home architecture by February 10, 2026, or risk losing control of HomeKit-connected smart devices and automations. PCWorld reports the updated system no longer supports iPads as home hubs, requiring an Apple TV 4K ($129+) or HomePod ($99) instead. Despite initial rollout problems in 2022, the re-released architecture since iOS 16.4 promises improved reliability and efficiency for smart home management. Well, this is it: After a series of delays, Apple is finally nixing support for its old Home architecture, meaning those still relying on the previous version of Apple's Home framework have some decisions to make--quickly. The moment of truth arrives February 10, 2026, less than a week away.

Google Home now supports smart button triggers for routines, filling a significant automation gap that Alexa and HomeKit have long offered users. PCWorld reports the update includes additional triggers like humidity levels, robot vacuum status, and contact sensor alerts for enhanced home monitoring.

The Meross smart plug mini boasts excellent compatibility and slim construction. On the hunt for new smart plugs to upgrade your home automation? One of our favorite picks, the Meross MSS110 Smart Plug Mini, is currently marked down on Amazon. The two pack is discounted from $34 to $27, and the four pack is down to $34 from its usual price of $52 . These plugs help add smart functionality to otherwise dumb devices around your home, like lamps or fans, so they can be included in your routines.

With grid operators confronting rising uncertainty from renewable integration and a broader push toward electrification, Demand-Side Management (DSM) -- particularly Demand Response (DR) -- has attracted significant attention as a cost-effective mechanism for balancing modern electricity systems. Unprecedented volumes of consumption data from a continuing global deployment of smart meters enable consumer segmentation based on real usage behaviours, promising to inform the design of more effective DSM and DR programs. However, existing clustering-based segmentation methods insufficiently reflect the behavioural diversity of consumers, often relying on rigid temporal alignment, and faltering in the presence of anomalies, missing data, or large-scale deployments. To address these challenges, we propose a novel two-stage clustering framework -- Clustered Representations Optimising Consumer Segmentation (CROCS). In the first stage, each consumer's daily load profiles are clustered independently to form a Representative Load Set (RLS), providing a compact summary of their typical diurnal consumption behaviours. In the second stage, consumers are clustered using the Weighted Sum of Minimum Distances (WSMD), a novel set-to-set measure that compares RLSs by accounting for both the prevalence and similarity of those behaviours. Finally, community detection on the WSMD-induced graph reveals higher-order prototypes that embody the shared diurnal behaviours defining consumer groups, enhancing the interpretability of the resulting clusters. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real Australian smart meter datasets demonstrate that CROCS captures intra-consumer variability, uncovers both synchronous and asynchronous behavioural similarities, and remains robust to anomalies and missing data, while scaling efficiently through natural parallelisation. These results...

Who doesn't want a camera in their toilet? Image of the Throne Toilet Computer perched on the side of a toilet. Throne has rocked up to CES 2026 to show off its forthcoming toilet computer which uses computer vision to study your poop. It hangs from the side of the bowl and has a camera and microphone to track bowel motions and urination and offer feedback. It was co-founded by (activity tracker) Whoop co-founder John Capodilupo, who explained the hardware is designed to understand what your base state is to be able to identify when you fall out of that pattern.