If you visit Sen.se Mother’s website, your first reaction might be to get creeped out. The product is billed as “like a mom, only better.” The company’s tagline is “the meaning of life.” Sen.se says that “Mother knows everything,” and with this device, your mom has been given “a slight upgrade.”
That’s weird. And Mother looks like a little ghost with glowing LED eyeballs, so it’s also a bit spooky. But rather than making all your nightmares come true, this fascinating and unique system can actually be pretty useful. It may even be the blueprint for how the “Internet of Things” can garner mainstream adoption.
So what does Mother actually do? Many things. It’s a stat-keeper, a data-visualizer, and a life coach. It won’t control the smartware you already have, but it does eliminate the need for a few single-purpose devices, such as door sensors and basic fitness trackers. Rather than assembling data from other devices, Mother analyzes and visualizes input from its own little freewheeling sensors, which you can put on your keychain, your toothbrush, your front door, under the fitted sheet in your bed, on grandpa’s bottle of heart pills, or on your coffee machine. You can also set up each sensor to make cartoony sound effects when shaken. This I did for a good five minutes.
After plugging Mother in and connecting it to your router, you finish setup in the browser and by performing tasks that tear down the fourth wall between real and electronic worlds. While configuring it, you immediately realize this gadget is not like the others.
In order to activate the base unit, the browser software prompts you to “Delicately touch [Mother] between the eyes.” To initialize its sensors—they’re called Motion Cookies—an on-screen prompt asks you to place them close to the base unit, tap one with your finger to help Mother recognize it, and then pick it up after it’s been recognized. Once you do, a round of applause blasts out of your computer’s speakers. It’s engaging, fun, and a little bit startling. Mother has “weird in a good way” down to a science.
Each Mother base unit comes with its own name. Mine was born Precious Josefa, but I quickly renamed it Albino Grimace. Whatever you want to call it, each 6.3-inch-tall duckpin-with-a-face plugs into a power source and your router with an included Ethernet cable. It acts as an in-home broadcast tower that sends and receives transmissions over its own ISM band, using the two-inch-long Cookies as its data tendrils. Four Cookies come with Mother, but each base unit supports incoming data from up to 24 Cookies; additional four-packs of Cookies are sold for $160.
While the base unit gives the system its oddball personality, it’s the Cookies and the software that are the real stars of the show. Think of the Cookies as freelance sensors. Each one runs on a user-replaceable CR2016 coin cell battery, which is rated for a year of battery life. The Cookies have built-in accelerometers and temperature sensors, which you can (re)configure with ease.
You can quickly assign them to create reports of your walking and running stats, tell you whenever your door opens, and provide a chart of your sleep cycles. You can also opt to have Mother send reminders, dispense advice, and offer words of encouragement (“You should pick up a toothbrush now,” “You’re way behind your [walking] target. Leave your couch and put on your shoes,” etc.). If you get tired of a certain application, you can reassign each Cookie to do something else. Number-crunching is done in the cloud after Mother absorbs your Cookie data.
The Cookies are color-coded and have unique two-word names printed on them—oddly poetic monikers like “brisk cupcake” and “known loquat”—making them easy to identify while programming and reprogramming them. You assign functions using apps available on Senseboard, a browser-based dashboard with visualization tools for everything you’re tracking. Current apps include Walk, Sleep, Door, Teeth, Medication, Presence, Temperature, Check, and Coffee. A mobile app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone displays your dashboard, but Cookie assignments need to be done in the browser.
After the unique setup process, the system sort of fades into the background and gets to work. In my tests, I used the Walk app to track my daily mileage and calorie burning, the Sleep app to gauge my slumber patterns, the Door app to let me know whenever anyone entered or left my apartment, the Teeth app to track my brushing habits, and the Temperature app to get readings from all my Cookies. The well-done Senseboard helps the cause, with easy-to-parse sortable charts that cleanly display daily and long-term data.
Senseboard typos aside (“Sweat dreams”), I was impressed by the Sleep app. It was eerily accurate despite being powered by a thumbdrive-sized sensor tucked beneath my sheets. When I had a bad night’s sleep, Mother knew it. When I had a particularly good one—in terms of quality, not quantity—it was also spot-on. One morning, I had a nightmare and woke up yelling at a murder-beast, and you could pinpoint the time it happened, between 5 and 6 a.m., in that night’s sleep chart.
The Walk app also worked well. I attached a Cookie to my keychain with one of the rubbery shells included in the box, which also can be used as a toothbrush mount. As compared to the other apps, which are built for in-home use close to the Mother base unit, there’s one big drawback in using a Cookie as a fitness tracker: You don’t get live, up-to-date stats unless you’re in Wi-Fi range of a Mother. It doesn’t have to be your own base station. Being within range of a friend’s base station—your brother with another Mother—will update your own account with your stats. Luckily, there’s plenty of time to sidle up to Mother, as the Cookies offer 10 days worth of memory and transmit your stats once a base station is in range.
There are a few weak spots. One of my four Cookies (“thin mochi”) didn’t work. According to Sen.se, the first batch of Cookies they made had issues, but the problem is fixed in shipping units. While email alerts and words of encouragement are free, you need to purchase a “credit pack” that costs $5 to $20 in order to receive text-message alerts from the system. And while Mother is the kind of thing you’ll try and immediately like—I didn’t initially take to the idea of tracking mundane tasks such as teeth-brushing and temperature-watching, but it grew on me—$300 is a steep price for taking the plunge. However, if you think of it in terms of how many items it could potentially replace, $300 is a bargain.
Ultimately, there is a lot to be excited about here. Mother is a weird and wonderful little ecosystem, and this platform and its structure have a lot of room for growth. The sensors and the software are bound to grow in versatility. According to Sen.se CEO Rafi Haladjian, the company is planning to open its API so that apps, smart devices, and services such as IFTTT can tap into Mother’s magic. Don’t fear the weird. Mother is innovative, and potential abounds.
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