Magic monitor

Like many good ideas, it began in a beer garden. Siemens researchers Manfred Kube and Karl Bitzer were soaking up the Munich sun in the summer of 2003 when they began talking about what would happen if they attached a couple of sensors to a wireless module.

Four years later, after much tinkering, extensive trials and a couple of prototypes, the AySystem — a wireless box of electronic tricks that can be used to monitor everything from your motorbike to your ailing grandmother — is about to go on the market.

The idea is elegantly simple. Armed with noise, motion and temperature sensors, the palm-sized GSM/GPRS device is left with whatever it is you want to monitor. The device is programmed via a dedicated web service. Then, if the threshold of a programmed sensor setting is exceeded — for example, if your grandmother falls over or your motorbike is stolen — the technology will immediately notify you via text message, phone call, or email.

AySystem’s inventors believe they are on to a winner. They claim it is the first of a new generation of consumer machine-to-machine (M2M) devices that will help meet some of the challenges presented by social trends such as the ageing population and increasing urbanisation. Plus, they say, thanks to the plummeting cost of electronic components, it is cheap to produce.

In the age of the ‘killer app’, AySystem is an unusual beast: it has been designed for several potential uses. And its creators believe its potential to slot into all sorts of corners of our lives will make it popular with consumers across the globe.

According to Kube, one of the most attractive applications for the system is its use as a low-cost security device for the protection of assets. ‘If you have one of these devices attached to a motorbike, for instance, you can log on to a central server and set it up to detect theft or movement,’ he said. ‘If someone drives it off you can track it using GPRS.’

AySystem is also expected to be popular with parents and carers. It could, for instance, be used as a baby monitor, or to alert concerned parents to deviations in their children’s’ routes home from school. Kube believes the system will be particularly useful for supporting independent living for elderly family members, where the device could alert relatives to a fall, or an uncharacteristic lack of movement.