Using cell phones for security purposes

You are taking your entire family out to have dinner at one of the Korean restaurants in town. Nobody stays at home, so you lock your house and you activate the solar-powered alarm. Then you drive away.

When you arrive at the restaurant, you park in the basement of the building. You make sure all the car's windows are properly closed and you lock its doors with the remote control. It automatically activates the car's alarm. And then you take the stairs out of the car park and head for the restaurant. The question is, are your house and car both really safe behind your back?

What if something triggered the alarm of your house while you are enjoying your delicious kalbi? It could be a burglar, a fire, or a stray cat. The result would be the same. The siren will be wailing continuously until the battery runs down, driving all your neighbors and the security guards nuts in the process. If you are lucky, one of your neighbors may have your cell phone number and can try to contact you to inform you what is happening at home. However, if you are a half-hour's drive from your home, that would not help much, either.

And, speaking of car alarms, how often have you been irritated by the constant wailing of a car's alarm while the parking attendants have not got a clue where its owner or driver is. Some people can be so perverted that they deliberately shake a car to set off its alarm and then immediately run away, leaving the others with their eardrums in pain.

Wouldn't it be nice to have the house or the car call your cell phone and let you know what is going on? There are products on the market that can do this. A local company, Afiscom (www.afiscom.co.id), for example, has developed sophisticated systems that will notify you through your cell phone if something happens to your house or car. If a butterfly has set off your house alarm, you can also stop the siren remotely. Your neighbors will certainly appreciate it. If you find out your car is being driven away by a car thief, you can even disable it remotely from your cell phone.

What, for example, if you want to visually check the condition of your house? Nokia has developed a GSM-based observation camera with motion-sensing capability. Using multimedia services (MMS), it can send captured images at a regular interval to your cell phone. Or, you can send an SMS to it to tell it to do so. That way, you will be able to tell if an intruder has entered your home.

You have to first connect this Nokia observation camera to a PC or notebook via the serial port and set the number that it has to send the captured images to. You can fix it to a strategic place inside your home or office. This observation camera is still in the prototype version, but it reflects one of the ways we use the new MMS capability of our cell phones.

The observation camera will also enable you to monitor what your children are doing while you are out entertaining some business partners. With the help of your cell phone, you can check whether they are really working on their homework as they had promised before you left, or whether they are busy playing with their PlayStation.

Needless to say, Nokia will not be the only company to market cell phone-based surveillance cameras like this one. So, while they can be a lifesaver, you can perhaps start saying goodbye to privacy.

--Zatni Arbi