Watch and Learn

Home alarm systems are typically better suited to annoying residents than deterring intruders – a buzzing, blinking eyesore that never seems to work quite right.

The Cocoon promises to replace all those bells, whistles, and wires with a baseball-sized device that can monitor the entire home.

“Our feeling was that the home security market is broken,” cofounder and COO Sanjay Parekh told us. “Your options are either a very expensive system with high maintenance fees or ugly white boxes with lots of false alarms… But we knew that adding a software layer to hardware was something we could leverage, turning something dumb into a smart device.”

Cocoon’s killer app is their “Subsound” technology – sensors that detect sound frequencies below 20 Hz. Typically used by seismologists, the tech allows one Cocoon device to monitor an entire house without line-of-sight.

“Once you connect Cocoon to wifi and the app,” Parekh said, “it will go through a learning phase – anywhere from one to two weeks – and learn what’s normal for your home and what’s not. When it detects something out of the ordinary, you get an alert.”

You can preorder a Cocoon from Indiegogo here – devices start at $299 and are expected to ship in late 2015.

Now go forth (and watch out).