Get your control freak on with stick-anywhere home sensors
Sense Mother and Motion Cookies are a flexible network of sensors you can put on anything from a toothbrush to a backpack. Feel better?
Originally published 12/17/2013, updated today with new video.
If you love being a mother hen, here's a family surveillance kit you can't do without: a home sensor network that's easy to set up and very versatile.
Mother from France's Sen.se is a smiling Barbapapa-style hub with a litter of Motion Cookie sensors that can go just about anywhere.
Designed to make your life "serene, healthy, and pleasurable," the network picked up a 2014 International CES Innovations Award in the category of Technology for a Better World.
Like many other products for an Internet of Things at home, Mother and its Motion Cookies are controlled with various app functions, but they present data in an illustrated storybook format on your tablet screen. What else would you expect from a mom?
The Cookies can be attached to toothbrushes, cups, doors, pill bottles, fridge doors, and nearly everything else. They can detect motion and temperature, and continuously ping the Mother unit, so you know if they are in or out of your home.
They have batteries that last about a year, and a range comparable to home Wi-Fi.
They can report on the temperature of a child's room, whether you're walking enough every day, or when someone tampers with your stuff.
It all depends where and how you deploy the sensors, which use a 915-MHz radio link in North America. It's up to you to decide if you need a sensor on your toothbrush.
Sen.se seems to have registered "the meaning of life" as its slogan. But don't hold that against it. The firm is co-founded by Rafi Haladjian, who launched rabbit-shaped Wi-Fi radio Nabaztag several millennia ago in 2006.
Sen.se is offering a pack of Mother and four Cookie sensors for $222, with shipping in spring 2014.