If you are conscious and serious about securing your home, I’m sure you have followed our blogs – specifically the ones describing the common-sense safety and security practices. With such practices, you can significantly reduce the potential for the intrusion to a large extent. However, many security-conscious peoples’ homes still get burglarized, which is when the homeowners start looking out for additional protection. With the pervasive use of Social Media, people become very aware of the burglary threats and feel the need for additional security. When there are significant life change events such as purchasing a new home, adding new family members – getting married, having children – these call for additional security measures. What choices do we have beyond basic, common-sense security practices?
Additional Home Security Measures
Home Security is big business. There are many choices depending on what we can afford. Cost is one factor, effectiveness is another. Just because an option is expensive doesn’t necessarily mean it is effective. In the next few blogs, we will explore all the options for their effectiveness and cost. At the one end of the cost spectrum, we can hire expensive private security guards, or pay for expensive security monitoring services. At the other end, we can buy relatively inexpensive DIY (Do-It-Yourself) security cameras and install them ourselves. Each of these many options has their own problems as we will discuss in our future blogs.
Let us take the case of Daniel, who had a security event in his life, and wanted to look for additional security measures. Daniel lived in a condominium when he was single and was unconcerned about security. While he was away on a particular business trip, a thief burglarized his house by entering through a side door. Daniel was very upset! When he got married and purchased a house, his first responsible action was to secure his home. Being a good DIY technologist, he researched several cameras and installed many around his house. Being an avid smartphone user, he configured to receive real-time alerts for detected activities from all the cameras. Daniel was very confident that he was well connected to protect his home, and could monitor any intruders. He felt satisfied that his home and family was well protected.
Daniel soon realized that there were several problems with this solution. He had busy days at work with no time but kept getting interrupted with hundreds or even thousands of alerts every day. Initially, he was very enthusiastic looking at each of the alerts, but most of them were not useful. He was so disillusioned that he started ignoring the alerts. Eventually, he just turned off the alerts completely. This action defeated his whole purpose of monitoring his home for intruders in real-time! See our video blog describing this scenario.
Finally, Daniel got smart. He felt there must be a different approach for securing his home. He did not want to see the hundreds of dumb alerts – caused by leaves flapping, shadow movements, unwanted roadside vehicles – interrupting his busy day. He wanted some service that filtered out all the irrelevant, dumb alerts and only sent him relevant Smart Alerts. That’s when he discovered Smart Sentry, which is a Cloud-based AI (Artificial Intelligence) Service that could learn what was relevant to Daniel’s home and sent only those applicable alerts. His daily alerts were reduced by over 90%, and gave him his life back!
In our future blogs, we will discuss additional Sentry capabilities on our roadmap, and how Smart Sentry is revolutionizing the home security industry.
