Back in the 1980s a colleague of mine was paranoid about being burgled. Before he went away on a two-week holiday, he bought the most expensive telephone answering-machine he could find and installed it in plain view on his hall table. Each morning he phoned it from Spain and hung up once he heard the outgoing message. He’d then enjoy the rest of the day content in the knowledge that his flat was safe; if no one had stolen his absurdly flashy answering machine, he reasoned, they wouldn’t have stolen anything else.
Today he could buy a Canary. These cost about £139 (the website’s canary.is) and let you view your own hallway in glorious HD from anywhere in the world. Your Canary will alert you to unexpected movements in your house, and monitor air quality and temperature. If you have a second home with a broadband connection, or if your main home is often empty, I can recommend this. Mine was easy to install and for the past year has worked without a glitch.
I suspect most people could benefit from some kind of home monitoring device, if only for reassurance. I am also a fan of those systems (Hive, Nest, etc) which let you control your central heating from anywhere.
My fear is, however, that there are so many stupid inventions now being devised for the ‘internet of things’ that the few good ideas get lost in the noise. It is now so easy and inexpensive to add wireless connectivity to anything — a fridge, a toaster, a waste bin — that it has become a lazy form of innovation. (It also poses scary security risks — in 2013 Dick Cheney underwent surgery to remove the wireless connectivity from his pacemaker, for fear that it could be hacked in an assassination attempt.
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