by
Mark Ollig
What
happens when our smoke detector goes off in the living room while we are away
from home?
That’s
right. Its high-pitched shrieking tone will just bounce off the interior walls
with no one aware of the potential disaster.
One
device our homes and businesses could use is an intelligent smoke alarm which
sends us a text message alert whenever it goes off.
Marcus
Schappi, an inventor from Sydney, Australia, answered the call and designed a
“remote control for your smoke alarm.”
He
recently demonstrated his new, intelligent, smoke detector.
It’s
called the Bop Smoke Alarm.
It
communicates with a user by way of an app (software application) downloaded to
a person’s mobile device.
Schappi’s
design was one of the award-winning apps selected during the Apps4Broadband
competition, co-hosted by the Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation, which
is a “national research initiative connecting people to the benefits of
broadband through innovative services.”
Apps4Broadband
participants were invited to develop prototypes or working applications
focusing on emerging technologies for delivering broadband services connected
to homes in Australia.
On
a recent video Schappi posted online, he demonstrated how the Bop Smoke Alarm
works.
“This
is the world’s smartest smoke alarm,” Schappi says at the start of the video.
The
Bop Smoke Alarm, via its internal Wi-Fi circuitry, maintains a constant
connection to a home or business’s broadband router or high-speed gateway.
The
alarm’s “intelligence” actually comes from a remote cloud-server, whose
software supports the features designed within the app.
Once
a user downloads the Bop Smoke Alarm app onto their mobile device, several
parameters can be set; such as the smoke alarm’s sensitivity.
For
example, when you are at home cooking, and the Bop Smoke Alarm goes off, it can
be programmed to delay activating an alert message, or the alarm can be
silenced from your mobile device.
A
person can program the Bop Smoke Alarm to not send out an alert SMS (Short
Message Service) text message to your mobile device until a predetermined
number of minutes have passed. The alert SMS message delay can be set for up to
10 minutes. A delay time can be used in order to avoid any false alarms (such
as when the smoke alarm goes off while cooking).
Speaking
of cooking, if the smoke alarm goes off while yours truly is cooking, you would
see him frantically waving a dish towel in the direction of the ceiling smoke
detector in a panicky effort to disperse the smoke enough to silence the alarm
before someone comes knocking on his door.
Remote
testing of the smoke alarm using the mobile device app can be accomplished, as
well. This provides peace of mind in knowing the smoke detector is working
properly when one is away from home or the office.
When
the Bop Smoke Alarm detects smoke, its audible alarm goes off. Then, via its
app programing in the data cloud, it will page your mobile device with an alert
SMS message in order to see if you reply; it does this first to make sure you
are personally OK.
However,
if you do not respond to this message within two minutes (I assume this is the
default setting), the Bop Smoke Alarm’s app will then call the telephone number
you specified during its original setup programming.
The
person receiving the phone call from the Bop Smoke Alarm program will hear:
“This is an automated warning. Smoke has been detected at (address is given).
The owner’s number is (the telephone number of the Bop Smoke Alarm’s home
address or owner is given). This message will repeat three times.”
Schappi
said the Bop Smoke Alarm “is provided as hardware and software as a service
(SaaS).”
One
does not need to worry about when to change out the Bop Smoke Alarm’s battery,
as a text message will be sent whenever its battery power is low.
Batteries
would be sent out for a user’s Bop Smoke Alarm whenever they are scheduled to
be changed, Schappi added.
Reliable
operation of the Bop Smoke Alarm requires:
•
Broadband (high-speed Internet) connection.
•
Always-on connection to the broadband.
•
Constant reliability of the network.
The
Bop Smoke Alarm, according to Schappi, supports “independent living,” and will
notify family or care providers of any smoke alarms it detects.
He
also pointed out that in Australia, 16 percent of the people living there are
hearing- impaired, and the SMS information and alert messages sent by the Bop
Smoke Alarm provides this percentage with a visual notification.
These
messages and alerts can also be sent to smartwatches, which vibrate when
receiving an incoming message.
Information
logs kept by the Bop Smoke Alarm app include the most recent smoke alerts, and
when they were acknowledged.
The
Bop Smoke Alarm system is scheduled to become commercially available in
Australia early 2014.
Plans
for any US sales of this new smoke alarm system were not immediately known.
The
Australian Centre for Broadband Innovation website is http://acbi.net.au.
To
watch the online video showing Schappi demonstrating the Bop Smoke Alarm, go to
http://tinyurl.com/bopalarm.
