A recent conversation with an acquaintance from an internet community I frequent prompted me to write this post. He’s not deaf, but he works from home in a basement with headphones on, and often misses the doorbell being rung. He asked the community if it was possible to somehow have his doorbell alert him via Growl on OSX, and I thought this was a really great idea, so I’m throwing it out here. I did a lot of Googling, but didn’t come up with a solution. With the level of technical, hacker, and Burning Man expertise that can be drawn upon here, I am sure someone reading this can put something together.
Alert systems for the deaf are often expensive and bulky. Generally, the basic concept is that one has several central transmitters in various rooms of the house that are hooked up to a lamp. Extra transmitters hooked up to the doorbell, smoke alarm, motion detector, baby monitor, and intruder alarm send wireless signals to the central transmitters, and they will cause the lamps they are hooked into to flash, and in some cases, a bed to vibrate. In some cases, doorbell and smoke alarm systems have to be hard-wired and installed by a professional electrician. There are pager-sized accessories that one can attach to their belt that will send vibrations when a signal is received, but to me, that’s the equivalent of buying a kitchen unitasker like an avocado slicer. Why have extra gadgets? Why not hack the gadgets we currently have?
In this time of smartphones, wonderful open-source platforms such as Android and with such tools as Growl at our disposal, I think it’s time to kick deaf tech up a notch. Suppose there was a way for the following audible alerts:
- Doorbell
- Baby monitor
- Smoke alarm
- Motion detector
- Telephone ringing
- Intruder alarm
- Oven timer
- Other audible alarms
to:
- Send SMS/text messages to a mobile phone
- Send a visual alert to an iPhone or Android phone
- Send a Growl notification to a computer screen
I visualize they would look something like this:
As my acquaintance said the other day,
“Imagine getting a text message while at work when the UPS guy rings your doorbell. Imagine getting a Growl notification on your computer when someone pulls into your driveway and activates a motion sensor.”
Sure sounds good to me. Let’s get a discussion going and start coming up with ways to make this happen.
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