Home Heartbeat
I'm mostly just going to link to Joe's excellent account of Home Heartbeat, but I wanted to draw some additional attention to it. Like Joe, I've had very little direct involvement with this project... except at the very beginning. MAYA has an idea development process called Tiger Teams, in which small teams generate competing product concepts and then present them. I happened to be the leader of the team that developed the Home Heartbeat concept, so I have a bit of a paternal interest in the concept ;-)

The thing that is compelling to me about the Home Heartbeat concept is that it's simple. Most home automation and home security products are both quite expensive and quite complex. They are hard to install (some require professional installation) and hard to maintain. If you've ever had the dubious pleasure of trying to make X10 work, you know what I mean. HH tries to be reasonably cheap and very easy. The compromise made is that HH doesn't do fancy things: it doesn't close your blinds or turn on your VCR, it just tells you the status of your house.

I think the personal inspiration for this idea came from being a fairly new homeowner. I bought a house in January of 2001 and have had two major problems (and lots of minor ones).

The first major problem was a fire. This was caused by a contractor working on the house, so he was there to call the fire department. They arrived promptly and saved most of the house (though they did a lot of water damage in the process). The second major problem was a burst pipe last year. I happened to be in the house (and, in fact, in the basement) when it happened, so I shut off the water.

But imagine if either of these had happened when no one was around?

I had another example of a water problem the other day. I was hunting around for a plunger and I discovered a drip under the kitchen sink. I had had no idea that there was a drip there, but it obviously had been going intermittently for some time. The cabinet under the sink is pretty warped as a result. I had a plumber fix it, but I'd love to have a water sensor down there to alert me if it comes back.

HH lets you keep track of lots of possible points of failure in your house... and it notifies you even if you're not there. As Joe points out, it can take some basic emergency action (like shutting off the water), but mostly it just lets you know if there's a problem.

Despite the fact that simplicity is the selling point, I hope that once people get a chance to think about the system, some more creative ideas will pop out. Joe describes some of the more unusual kinds of "sensors" (like the reminder sensor and the attention sensor) we've already thought of, but I suspect this is just the beginning. I also think it's going to be interesting once the developer tools are done and geeky types can start hacking around... at that point I think it's going to start making sense to think about adding more control features to the system.