Smart Home Monitor - Feature Requests

NB: The pieces involved are more likely to function optimally if they are local, of course, eliminating internet or cloud load latency.

  1. Mobile (phone GPS) Presence is based on a radius, so presumably an optimal radius (i.e., something you enter perhaps 1 or 2 minutes ahead of opening any “armed” door), then it will, if per spec, disarm in time. Unfortunately, mobile presence will likely always require the Cloud.

  2. The simplest comprehensive solution is for SHM to have an across the board “user definable Alarm Delay period”, during which an intrusion can be Alarm completely cancelled upon selected valid conditions: Presence, IRIS keypad, Door Lock PIN Pad, App button, secret sequence of light switches turned on, etc…

  3. Alarm Delays would even be valid for Smoke and Water Alerts. i.e,. SHM should give a pre-alert (i.e., Smoke Detected, please press perform your cancel options if false; and also it would double-check for smoke for perhaps 1 minute…).

Not much can be done about #1. Fast and accurate Presence is an independent issue that ST needs to work on regardless of SHM.

But I think a basic Alarm Delay / Alarm Deferral is easy to implement, and can be made as simple or as complex as desired… Complex, for example, would be a series of escalating Alert Actions triggered by the initial Event:

  • Initial event notification for information purposes so the customer is gently reminded to perform the next steps (I think some traditional Alarm Systems blink a light on their keypads or even beep softly at this phase, even if that could be a warning to burglars, that’s not so bad … get rid of them quickly).

  • Second stage alert notification is the last chance to cancel the Alarm within 30 seconds or whatever is reasonable.

  • Third stage is pretty much already in place: Local alarms go off, but the monitoring company telephone calls or triggers some sort of high priority message to ask if this is a false alarm or not and does not contact emergency responders for a few more minutes.

  • Fourth stage could still be offered; even after police or fire is contacted, there should be a procedure to securely issue the all clear to minimize impact of a false alarm. It may or may not be too late to abort the emergency responder from investigating, but knowing the Alarm was securely cancelled can impact how they handle the scene (i.e., guns and fire-hoses drawn or… not).

###TL;DR
Alarm delay/deferral timeouts in escalating stages is a standard, basic, (and usually fully customizable) feature of every traditional alarm system. It is unfortunate that SHM was launched without these options, but SHM is currently going through a major overhaul to add at least some improvement towards this basic feature.

I trust that this is a rather high priority because SHM is fundamental to several important potential ongoing (i.e., subscription) revenue streams.

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