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R_www.theguardian.com 2015 03630.txt.txt

#The innovators: burglar alarms upgraded for the smartphone age As history has it, the young Isaac newton found inspiration for the theory of gravity by watching apples fall to the ground. Dan Conlon big idea was born after smashing the bell box of a faulty alarm system off the side of his house in the early hours of the morning as the ringing kept the neighbourhood awake. It was not the first time Conlon had had a problem with an alarm. He had won previously a court case after his business broke a contract with an alarm company when the service was frequently out of action and had regular false alarms. So when he and his colleagues were looking for an idea for a new business last year, the home alarm seemed ripe for an overhaul for the internet age. e were surprised...that the technology had moved not really on since the 80s, he said. assumed that there would be loads of easy smartphone connected alarm systems and there were not. e found that a lot of people who own an alarm don bother to set it either because they don believe that it will do anything useful or it will be a false alarm and no one will do anything. ut also, there is the hassle factor of keying in a PIN code when you are rushed going out the door in the morning trying to get to work on time. Next year Cocoon will be launched at a cost of £299. A device slightly larger than a tennis ball Cocoon uses a microphone to detect sounds outside of the hearing range of humans to alert in case of intruders in the home. Using smartphones to identify the various residents of the house or flat, the device learns their movements and eliminates them from the sound waves it detects, in turn identifying unusual movements such as those of a burglar. At the heart of the Cocoon unit is a microphone which can detect infrasound waves, which range from about 0. 5hz to 18hz, and are associated more commonly with communication between elephants or the detection of a volcanic eruption from a distance. nfrasound is the range of sound which is just below what the human ear can hear. It is still sound it is still vibrations in the air-in the same way that a sound wave is -but it is said very low frequency Conlon, 32. ou can put a sensor in a building and you can then hear those inaudible sounds that are created by things happening in that building. People moving around move air, vibrate floorboards, they close doors and drawers and so on, so they make infrasound. The use of infrasound in commercial alarm systems goes back decades. But costs prohibited the sensors being used widely in home alarms, as did the fact that an unsophisticated infrasound microphone would pick up unwanted sound waves, such as people walking by outside or a lorry going past. The five cofounders of Cocoon have used smartphones and machine learning to filter out this noise and isolate the waves which may signal a threat. The device learns over three days how residents come in and out and live. Through an app on the phones of the residents, the device understands their movements and then builds up a model or rainaccording to the company of what happens when people are in the home. It knows when people are outside of the home as the phones will not be present. The alert of an intruder can be sent to the smartphone of the residents and a camera on the device which also has fitted a siren shows images of what is happening within its range. A subscription service is planned where a call centre will monitor the home if an alert goes off and will be able to contact the police. There are potential problems. f you have no smartphone, the product is not for you. We think that the vast majority of the population do, specifically our target markets the segments that have that high propensity to adopt it first, Conlon said. What if someone forgets their phone? f that happens then the system will not be armed. It will think that they are at home in the same way as if someone forgets to arm up their alarm when they go out, he said. The company argues that many children who do not have smartphones may be with their parents anyway. ou can really buy a phone that is not a smartphone any more. It is only if you have not had a new phone for five years that it is not Android or ios, he said. Initial tests in 15 homes have yet to catch a burglar redhanded but crucially have missed also not any, said Conlon. What is infrasound? Infrasound is sound with a frequency of less that 20hz, which is outside of the range that humans can hear. Both elephants and giraffes use it to communicate over long distances, meaning that conservationists can track them when they are hidden in forests. Infrasound is produced when a volcano erupts resulting in the event being able to be tracked from remote locations. It is suspected that a group of birds detected infrasound waves from a storm approaching their breeding grounds last year and subsequently flew to safety d

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