The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight shows how a good smart home device can be a dead simple one.
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home. Leeo
It's a $99 light that pings an app if your smoke detector's going off when you're not at home.
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it. Leeo
You can basically plug it in, connect it to your Wi-Fi, and forget about it.
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings. Leeo
"Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable," says Leeo co-founder Adam Gettings.
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people." Leeo
"But if technology complicates this, then they're not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that's a very small percentage of people."
The Leeo Smart Alert Nightlight is not the stuff of soft-focus smart home dreams. It won’t vacuum your floor, or start your coffee pot when you wake up in the morning. It doesn’t create an intelligent mesh network with the other gizmos around it. It’s just a $99 nightlight that lets you know if your house is burning down when you’re not around. Which is to say, it’s a pretty reasonable take on what a connected gadget should be.
Adam Gettings, Leeo’s co-founder, says the nightlight is just the first in what will be a series of connected devices designed for regular people. At a point where connectivity, processing power, and sensor technology are mature enough to really solve problems in the home, Gettings and company are looking to figure out the next challenge: making it all useful to people who don’t like futzing with technology.
Keeping Things Simple With a Low-Tech Trick
To help design a device for the mass market, Leeo tapped Ammunition, the design firm behind Beats by Dre and the Square credit-card reader. For the designers there, the challenge with the nightlight was keeping things simple.
The device itself has a circular face, about three-quarters the size of a CD, with LEDs that glow onto the wall behind it. Spinning the outside rim of the face dims the light. The real smarts kick in when the device hears your smoke detector going off. Then, it’ll ping an accompanying app on your smartphone, giving you the option to call the fire department.
This central function relies on one especially clever trick. You don’t actually connect it to your smoke detectors in any way. Instead, thanks to the strict regulations on how smoke alarms have to sound, the light is able to simply listen for that familiar beep-beep-beep, and alert the app when it’s detected. It’s a terrifically clever, low-tech solution that removes a lot of potentially messiness from the device’s installation. As Matt Rolandson, the Ammuntion partner who led the project, explains it, the approach ensures that the light will work with existing smoke detectors. Sound waves, he says, are “a network that’s already in every home.”
The nightlight glowing blue. Leeo
Even after installation, the nightlight maintains a low-key presence. Unlike many smart home gadgets, it doesn’t demand a bunch of new interactions. It doesn’t add new interactive overhead to your life. There are no monthly fees. It’s just a $99 insurance policy against an unlikely but potentially devastating domestic catastrophe. You can just plug it in and forget about it.
As Gettings sees it, keeping fussiness to a minimum is crucial for any connected device with mainstream ambitions. “Most people are interested in their homes being more efficient, or safer, or more comfortable,” he says. “But if technology complicates this, then they’re not going to adopt it. Hobbyists will always find complexity interesting. But that’s a very small percentage of people.”
How to Get In Peoples’ Homes: Practical Answers
Part of the inspiration for the nightlight came during a focus group conducted in Leeo’s early days. Of the hundred people they talked to, precisely one had heard the term “internet of things.” Here’s a massive trend that’s discussed breathlessly in the tech world, and yet, when it came to normal people, almost no one had heard of it.
For the company, the takeaway was obvious: Connected devices and smart home solutions are still targeted at early adopters and gadget enthusiasts. With Leeo, they’re trying to focus on everyone else.
Rolandson, the Ammunition designer, says that doing so requires a product that makes its value clear in a very straightforward way. “We want to be able to ask and answer very practical questions that everyone will understand,” he explains.
Here, that’s something like the following: Do you have a home? Do you worry about keeping your home safe? Would you want to know if something bad was happening to your home, and if it was, would you want to be able to do something about it, without spending several thousand dollars retrofitting your home with electronics?
If the answer to those questions is obvious, then so is the appeal of Leeo’s light. As Robert Brunner, Ammunition’s founder puts it, “you can’t force your way into peoples’ homes.”
A Regional Approach to the Internet of Things
Leeo could expand the functionality of their light in months to come. Right now, the light just listens for smoke detectors, but Gettings says it could potentially be made to detect other sounds, like windows breaking or a dog barking. The approach shows how software can wring new functionality out of basic components. “I think there’s a very long innovation path for something as simple as a processor and a sound sensor,” Gettings says.
But the nightlight is just the first product Gettings and team have planned for the company. They envision a line of devices, all designed to solve specific problems in various international markets. As Leeo sees it, the most effective smart home solutions might well vary region to region.
Nightlights, the founders point out, are a uniquely American product. Fire safety is also something Americans fixate on more than people elsewhere. But the smart alert nightlight might not make as much sense overseas. In Europe, Gettings says, homeowners are more concerned with efficiency. China obsessives over air quality. Japan values comfort in the home.
The big vision for Leeo is to find solutions that speak to the diverse, everyday concerns found around the world. “There are different sensibilities,” Gettings says. “Our mission here is to have a global approach.”
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