Ever wondered how Cocoon reacts to the noises in your home? Well, in a very similar way to the way you do.
Things that go bump in the night
Imagine for a second that you’re lying awake in bed and you hear a noise, what do you do? Well, firstly it depends how familiar you are with your surroundings and if you think anyone should be moving around at that time? If so, you may not be worried at all and drift calmly back to sleep.
If, however, you think the house should be empty, you’ll pay more attention. But you probably won’t jump out of bed to investigate just one bump (unless it’s a really loud noise!). Instead, you’ll listen a little more. If the noises are unusual, you’ll worry more and more until you take action. You’ll be particularly worried if you hear a noise which you think never occurs in an empty house – perhaps that squeaking floorboard on the stairs?
Cocoon thinks and reacts very similarly to the way you do.
Cocoon’s microphone picks up a range of sounds in your home, passing them through a signal processing pipeline. This pipeline then filters out higher frequency noise to give emphasis to the low-frequency infrasound that is inaudible to the human ear. The low-frequency sound is then analysed and given a ‘fingerprint’ so that Cocoon can compare sounds occur in the future and determine how similar they are.
Once your family have installed the Cocoon app on their phones your Cocoon will start to understand who should be in the house, who comes and who goes. This means that your Cocoon knows when your house should be empty and Cocoon can learn which infra-noises are usual in your empty house, and which are not.
Since Cocoon has an idea of which sounds are similar to each other, and which sounds are usual in your particular empty house, Cocoon can determine which sounds are unusual. Your Cocoon might worry a bit about most sounds, but it worries most about those associated with people moving in your house.
If there’s no activity for a while, Cocoon relaxes, but a short burst of worrying activity will be enough to spur it into action and contact you.
When your Cocoon gets in touch with you, it’s time for you to take charge, see what is going on (and what was going on in the build-up to the alert) and decide what action you want to take!
John leads the Cocoon Software Development team behind Subsound™ and plays with hula-hoops in his spare time! If you have any questions about anything you’ve read here let us know in the comments!