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Christophe Deschamps was watching a basketball game with his wife and three children when he received an alert on his smartphone.
The home security system told him something was wrong, so he quickly accessed the video feed on his phone.
"I could see smoke," he says. Their home, in the Wallonia region of southern Belgium, was on fire.
The family's thoughts immediately turned to their two Bernese Mountain dogs - Lisbonne and Hawaii - locked in the garage. A terrible family tragedy was threatening to unfold.
The video images now showed the smoke getting thicker and brightness coming from flames off-camera.
The fire alarm had already alerted the firefighters, so the Deschamps family rushed home as quickly as they could.
...
Fortunately, Lisbonne and Hawaii were saved with just 20cm of air left to breathe above the floor of the smoke-filled garage. But the fire damage to the house took six months to repair.The dogs' lucky escape was due to the indoor security camera Christophe had installed.
So, the Internet of Things (IoT) is really a good thing.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by ledow on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:02AM (4 children)
Maybe if they hadn't locked the dogs in a damn garage, the dogs would have been perfectly safe anyway.
Isn't this why you have pet-doors and the like?
And I'd be much more concerned about the fecking neighbours and gas lines, etc. than the dogs in the garage. "It was more important for us to save the dogs than the house," - You're an arsehole. Not even any mention of alerting neighbours (hey, we have a smartphone, wonder how we could do that?)
And their lucky escape was NOTHING to do with the camera. It was to do with the fire alarm that had already alerted firefighters, and which set off the camera by its noise (not even by a specific relay / alert line? Come on people). If that fire alarm has been linked to the smartphone instead, you wouldn't have had to log on, rely on the interpretation of a cheap computer vision instrument, and lucky cameras angles, to diagnose that the house was on fire. It would have actually alerted you sooner, and you could have got home sooner, and saved the dogs sooner.
In this case, reliance on IoT actually made things SLOWER and LESS RELIABLE than just buying a fire alarm that texts you when it activates.
P.S. What was the cause of the fire? Because no amount of IoT can combat stupidity.
(Score: 5, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 09 2017, @10:18AM
the fire started in the cheap chinese transformer needed by the smart thermostat or something
(Score: 5, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday May 09 2017, @12:46PM
In this case, reliance on IoT actually made things SLOWER and LESS RELIABLE than just buying a fire alarm that texts you when it activates.
Indeed, or as they did in the "olden days" -- the fire alarm would send an alert to the security company, who would then call you. We can obviously automate this process more easily now, but I don't get what the video camera has to do with anything here. Home security systems have been offering similar services for decades; no video camera streaming to a smartphone necessary. Fire alarms would have registered the alert.
What I particularly resent about this story is that it seems like a weird sort of advertisement, because "saving the family pet" is so emotionally manipulative in a lot of contexts. Anyone ever been to a movie where bad guys and good guys do whatever (with little audience reaction), but everyone cheers when the family dog or whatever is saved?
By the way, I'm not as down on the Internet of Things as a concept as some people seem to be. In some cases, there can obviously be helpful features. It's just that they're often so poorly implemented, the IoT buzzword is often about creating hype more than functionality, and frequently the use cases just seem pretty unlikely ("Now your toaster can be on the internet! Why wouldn't you want that?!").
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday May 09 2017, @05:17PM (1 child)
Just letting your dogs wander the streets and poop on everything is frowned on these days...
(Score: 2) by ledow on Tuesday May 09 2017, @08:23PM
It's called a fence.
Or a kennel.
Or a large caged area.
So the dog moves around rather than sits in a garage that they can't escape if something goes wrong.