The Sen.se Mother ($299) is a home and personal monitoring device. By checking a website or your smart phone, you can monitor the temperature in the house to see if the air conditioning or heat are working, for example, or find out whether a door has been opened and closed. You can also keep tabs on family members, to know whether they have taken their medication, among other things.
It's an intriguing example of the "connected home" and the "Internet of things," buzzwords you'll be hearing more often. Sen.se Mother does some things fairly well, and it could give you peace of mind. But our tests found some shortcomings that indicate it's not quite ready for prime time.
What it is
The system consists of a bulbous Mother base unit and four small, battery-powered sensors called Motion Cookies. The base must be hardwired with an Ethernet cable to your home network; it doesn't work on Wi-Fi. The Cookies communicate wirelessly with the Mother unit using the ISM band (Industrial Scientific and Medical band). Sen.se says the range of the device is 65 feet inside a home and 164 feet in an open space.
The Mother base unit has a red smile and eyes that can be programmed to be any of eight different colors (which is interesting and a bit creepy). You can turn on the base unit or put it to sleep by touching it between the eyes.
The Cookies can measure and report temperature and movement, via a built-in thermometer and a three-axis accelerometer, respectively. You program each Cookie to track certain kinds of information using Sen.se's apps, which currently include Door, Walk, Temperature, Sleep, Medication, Teeth, Presence, Cartoon, Check, Coffee, and Battery. Eventually, Fridge, Drink, and Plants apps will be added.
All of the apps require that a Cookie be used in some way—carried in a pocket, attached to a valuable item, strapped to a medicine bottle, or screwed to a door, for example. The kit includes holders, straps, and a putty-like adhesive for attaching the Cookies to items. The Cookies measure and transfer the data to the Mother, which then sends it on to the Sen.se website and to an app on your smart phone. For instance, if you attach a Cookie to your child's keys, the base unit would sense when she arrived home and alert you.
Each Cookie can monitor and report its battery level and temperature (they use CR2016 batteries). You can put multiple apps on one Cookie, but note that each Cookie can host only one app that relies on motion. Additional Motion Cookies can be purchased (four for $159) and added to the Mother unit, up to a total of 24 Cookies.
A Cookies senses motion using its accelerometer, and the app determines if the motion meets its definition of an action. For example, the Walk app counts the steps taken by someone carrying or wearing a Cookie. The magnitude and frequency of the motion is used to determine whether the user is walking or running, and the values set during the initial setup (such as stride length and weight) allow the app to calculate distance and calories.
How we tested
We set up the Mother in a lab with Internet access. Since it needs to be hard-wired into the same network as your computer, we added an extra router to split our Ethernet port. That is probably a requirement for most installations, if you even have Ethernet cables in your home. (Mother does not work over Wi-Fi.)
We plugged in the base unit, and touched it between the eyes to wake it up and get it going. Then we set up the Cookies: added batteries and renamed all the devices. (They come with unique default names. The base unit was “Lisandra Marcene," and the Cookies were “cool sheker,” “clever fruit,” “tender peanut,” and “double life.”)
We set up each Cookie with a few of the apps. We assigned Temperature and Battery to each, then Door, Walk, Medication, and Check, one for each of our four Cookies. We configured the apps to create alerts and relay them by e-mail, text, and sounds, and to send summaries by e-mail.
After choosing the apps, we placed the Cookies near the base unit for programming. When that was finished, we opened and closed the door, walked around, took our fake medicine, and rattled our valuables, and generally played with the Cookies. They can be re-programmed easily, set to do a different task, but only one task at a time—a process which we also tried.
What we found
Generally, the Mother devices work. The information collected by the Cookies, available to view on the website and on the Mother app on our smart phone, was nicely presented, colorful, interesting, and somewhat useful. But the biggest limitation was sensitivity.
For example, when we moved the door softly, we did not trigger a notification from the attached Cookie that the door had been opened and closed—not very good if you are need an immediate notification when, say, your elderly parent gently opens the door and wanders off.
Another limitation was specificity of movement, which isn't really explained in detail in the setup. For example, the Medication app allows you to choose your medicine container type: bottle, box, blister pack, or pill box. But the instructions don’t say that medicine is considered "taken" when a bottle is tilted more than a certain amount. So it is unclear which setting is best to use.
The batteries in the Cookies were an issue as well: They started to go dead almost immediately. The one we renamed “Blue Cookie” was especially problematic; it used up our replacement battery in just about a week—bad news at $2.99 a pop. And unfortunately, e-mail we sent to the manufacturer for support has gone unanswered.
The ability to send text message alerts, a feature that we particularly liked, stopped working partway through our tests: The number of text messages you can send as alerts is limited, and when we used up our allotment, we were not able to buy more. The literature states that extra messaging is available in the Web store, but we could find only the base kit and extra cookies for sale there.
Bottom line
The concept shows promise, but the Mother and her Cookies are not really ready for prime time. The system is useful if you need to monitor certain aspects of your life: say, your elderly parents’ movements within their home, so that you can check on them without calling. But the battery problems, low sensitivity, and poorly maintained website mean that this product needs refinement before it is truly useful.
Other home-monitoring and automation systems have much more specificity in their devices, such as door alarms that are actual switches and are not dependent on the door being moved briskly. The Mother’s attempt to make one device fit all uses means that those uses have limitations. Perhaps Sen.se will eventually design and sell Cookies for specific tasks. But for now, it's closer to being the toy it resembles than to a dependable home appliance.
—Bernie Deitrick
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