New Home Monitoring System Tested

Vanessa Brice had some unwelcome visitors to her Orlando home last October. They came not under the cover of darkness, but as the sun was shining high. They were burglars, and they were brazen.

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?They came right in the front door, broke it down, in the middle of the day. (They) walked out with a 60-inch TV, two 36-inch TVs, multiple gaming systems, laptops,? Brice said. ?Nobody saw anything. Nobody heard anything.?

Her family lost about $16,000 worth of electronics. Still, Brice knows it could have been a lot worse. ?We have a teenage daughter who drives herself to and from school, and my concern is that theoretically she could have walked in on strange people taking things in and out of our house. And that scared me more than anything else.?

That experience and the sense of being violated still haunts her today, and prompted her to volunteer when Local 6 asked for volunteers to test out a new video security system. The system is called the Archerfish Solo. Its manufacturer, Cernium, calls the Solo, a ?thinking camera,? because it not only detects motion, it can be customized to look for specific objects that a homeowner wants to watch for.

For example, when Debbie Shuey, a Cernium representative, demonstrated the Solo at Brice?s house, she programmed the camera to capture two kinds of objects: people and vehicles. The system, which works through the home?s wireless router, provides a web portal where homeowners can enter their own customizations and draw out specific zones for the camera to monitor.

In Brice?s case, Shuey outlined the front door and driveway as the target zones, meaning the camera would look for people coming up the front walk and vehicles entering the driveway.

As Shuey installed the system she explained that it can be used to monitor various events, like package deliveries, kids coming home from school, or criminals on your property. ?Anything that comes into the field of view and stays there for two seconds, (it) will tell me about it,? Shuey explained, pointing out the most important feature of the Solo. It will send users a video alert to their cell phones or e-mail addresses when it captures the images it is programmed to monitor.

?If nothing else, it would alert me to something potentially dangerous to my daughter, and I could call her and say don?t go home,? Brice said.

A Local 6 crew tested the device at Brice?s house. Two people walked to the front door. One of them also drove a van into Brice?s driveway. Within seconds, Brice received a text message on her iPhone for each event. The text messages came in this order: Person Detected, Person Detected, Vehicle Detected. The messages came with 10-second video clips of the front door ?guests? and the car, showing that the system worked flawlessly.

The Solo, while targeting specific objects, also contains a DVR that records continuously. Even if homeowners don?t receive alerts, they can review a whole day?s worth of events around their house. The system is completely Internet based, allowing users to check alerts or view live video of their homes from any iPhone, Android phone, or any computer in the world.

The camera sells for $349. E-mail and video alerts require a $5 monthly subscription plus 99 cents per unit. There is no monthly charge for Internet-only monitoring.

?If everyone had one of these, we?d have a lot less crime,? Brice said with both a laugh and the resignation of someone who has learned the hard way.