Close your eyes and enjoy this flight. And let’s imagine for the purposes of this little scenario that you’re travelling outbound (even if you’re really heading home). So don't think about the trip to come, the meetings, whatever. Think about your house instead. Specifically, if you left it empty, did you shut the windows? Did you check the freezer was working? Did you leave the oven on?
Sorry to worry you, but I’ve been trialling an amazing new British home security system developed by a delightfully boffiny young company whose HQ is above a French restaurant in Cambridge.
It’s for you to decide whether AlertMe (alertme.com) will have the net effect of making you more paranoid or less when you’re away from home, but I find just the technology behind the system fascinating both in a love-of-gadgets sense, and, if you will, philosophically.
AlertMe is an install-it-yourself security-and- more home control system. It’s exceptionally easy to fit, simple and user-friendly. Plus it’s cheap — a starter kit costs £149 and you’d be hard pushed to spend more than £600 (plus a £100 annual subscription) for a really sophisticated setup.
AlertMe works via wireless-enabled sensors — as many as you like — that you can monitor and control remotely with a computer or mobile phone. Placed all over your house, outbuildings and garage, these communicate with a central hub that's connected to your broadband and keeps you informed wherever you are in the world about what’s happening to your property via email, text and voice alerts.
AlertMe doesn’t clutter up your already overburdened home WiFi network, but uses its own low-power, short-range, two-way radio system, ZigBee. It’s not affected by electricity outages as it’s all battery powered.
There’s a range of sensors, with more coming out soon. For the moment, there are door and window contacts (which can be used in inventive ways, such as on a cat flap), alarm sensors (which listen out for smoke and carbon monoxide alarms), movement detectors, customisable buttons that can be used as anything from a doorbell to a panic alarm, and smart key fobs that keep track of who is in and out of the house.
Then there are energy-related accessories — smart plugs with which you can turn appliances in the home on and off remotely, a central heating controller and an electricity usage monitor that does a lot of incredibly clever stuff too involved to go into here — but which can alert you to items using too much power or warn you if, say, a freezer stops working. Coming down the line are more AlertMe bits, such as webcams to monitor rooms and other gadgets aimed in particular at people wanting unobtrusively to monitor the welfare of elderly parents.
What this all means is that, if you suspect while you’re on this flight that you’ve, say, left a window open, you can check it from your phone the moment you get off the plane and do whatever is necessary, such as phone a key holder. And throughout your trip you can be assured that whatever happens at home, you’ll know about it pretty much instantly.
What I find significant about AlertMe as much as the delights it offers for any self-respecting control freak, is that all the hard work, the stuff that would once have required manned call centres and men in vans visiting your home to check out the burglar alarm, is done ‘backstage’ by the existing internet and mobile phone networks, without any appreciable extra cost to you.
This amazing communications infrastructure, which effectively has infinite capacity to deal with our need to keep in touch and know what’s going on where, has only just started to be exploited by clever techno-entrepreneurs such as the AlertMe team. It will be fascinating to see what they and their successors create in the years to come.
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