Millions of smart home security systems are getting a little smarter this week. A new feature called Smart Arming brings a bit of flexibility to the arming and disarming settings of Alarm.com systems, making you less likely to accidentally trigger the alarm and more likely to actually use it.
Smart enable is now available on systems powered by Alarm.com, a company that supplies both hardware and software to hundreds of local and national home security companies. Instead of a rigid on/off schedule, Smart Arming allows you to schedule windows to arm and disarm, then use information from security sensors in your home that you select to determine when to set or disarm the alarm within that time frame. windows. It’s like the difference between a programmable thermostat that follows its schedule no matter what, and a smart thermostat that can adjust its behavior depending on whether someone is actually home.
Smart Arming does not use AI or machine learning
With Smart Arming, you won’t accidentally set off the alarm if you leave at 05:30 instead of 06:00 – the motion sensors can detect you moving towards the door and disarm the system before the whole house wakes up. And if you go to the fire pit one night when the alarm is usually about to arm, the system can use data from the contact sensor on the door to wait for you to re-enter before arming itself.
Despite being marketed as “intelligently” customizing your alarm system, Smart Arming doesn’t use AI or machine learning. “It takes input from sensors throughout the house to determine when to turn it off. It doesn’t teach your patterns, but it does understand them,” said Abe Kinney, senior director of product management at Alarm.com. The edge. Essentially, it’s a slightly more nuanced set of rules for your alarm system.
This kind of innovation is a bit unusual in the smart home security space. Many “smart” systems are only smart because you can control them with an app and connect them to a platform like Amazon Alexa or Apple Home. The actual security side is still mostly what it always has been: if a sensor is triggered when the alarm is armed, the system will alert a homeowner/call the monitoring service – without much nuance beyond that. This is because, when you play with people’s safety, you need to know you’re doing it right, and simplicity is the safest option.
Alarm.com and other companies use machine learning features for less critical areas, such as on cameras, to identify people over other movements. Alarm. com also has a feature called Unexpected Activity alerts that uses the “Insights engineto learn a household’s behavior patterns and send an alert if anything unusual happens beyond a standard security event.
In general, features that make alarm systems easier to use – more convenient to arm and less likely to accidentally activate – are a good thing. Many people (myself included) worry about arming a system because the cat, a child or a visitor may accidentally activate it, and they don’t want the whole household to wake up or the police knocking on the door for a false report. alarm.
Features like these make alarm systems easier to use — easier to arm and less likely to be accidentally activated
While many smart security systems can be set to arm and disarm automatically based on the geolocation of your household’s phones, that only helps when you leave the house, not so much when you go to sleep at night.
Others – like ecobee – use facial ID to automatically switch off when someone it recognizes comes home. But the idea that your alarm system can know no one has broken in if your preschooler goes to the kitchen for an early morning snack without a camera in the house is even better.
The obvious downside here is that the system can get it wrong: someone breaks in but the alarm doesn’t go off because there had been activity a few moments before. Kinney says this concern is why the feature requires time windows, so if something happens in the middle of the night, you’ll know for sure, he says.
