IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2016 - 134

Product Reviews

For Safety, Health,
and Well-Being
By William Lumpkins (Sanitate)

Schlage SenSe
Smart DeaDbolt

remocam

Schlage sent us the Schlage Sense smart
deadbolt to review (Figure 1). In 1909,
Walter Schlage's first patent was a door
lock that could turn lights on and off for
Western Electric. Walter's patents and
his company, the Schlage Lock Company, went on to become part of the Allegion brand of security and safety
products in 2013. They currently sell the
Schlage Sense smart deadbolt at major
retailers in the United States and abroad.
We installed the Schlage Sense
smart deadbolt on the front door of our
prospective smart house; the installation was relatively easy, the instructions
were simple to follow, and the link to
the online videos was helpful. Make
sure to keep any paperwork until after
setting up the lock; a special code
found on the paperwork is used to register the lock. After installing the lock,
which uses four double-A batteries
(unfortunately, not rechargeable), I
downloaded the Schlage Sense application from the Apple App Store. With
the special code found on the Schlage
paperwork (that I dug out of the trashcan), I was able to register the deadbolt
with my home Wi-Fi access point.
After it was set up, we tried a few of
the listed features. In theory, you can
use Apple's Siri to unlock the lock with
your Apple phone. It could be due to
the poor cellular signal coverage in my
test area, but we found that it took up to

three minutes for the door to unlock via
the Siri voice commands. It was much
easier to type or press the keypad to
enter the house. I loved the lock;
there's no need to carry a key to enter
the house. It's too bad that there isn't
an option to mount a camera to allow
facial recognition for door entry but,
perhaps, in the future it will be included.

Figure 2. The Remocam. (Photo courtesy
of Remocam.)

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCE.2016.2560322
Date of publication: 10 August 2016

134 IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine

Figure 1. The Schlage Sense smart deadbolt.

JULY 2016

Speaking of cameras, Remocam sent us
their home video surveillance product
called Remocam. Remocam began as an
offshoot of a South Korean security
camera company that wanted to sell to
the North American market.
The Remocam (Figure 2) is relatively
small and easy to set up. All you have to
do is plug in the power, connect it to
your Wi-Fi, and plug in the optional
speaker/microphone jacks and external
secure digital card. The toughest part of
the installation was getting the Remocam
camera to recognize the quick response
code image on the smartphone. Remocam tells me they are still working out
some bugs. The product has a motion
detector built in, and we noticed some
odd behavior that we finally figured out.
(By the way, whoever says that engineers
do not believe in the supernatural have
not met our engineers.)
The situation was as follows. We set
the Remocam up in a house with two
levels and then went out to a coworker's
office and showed him the Remocam.
The Remocam lets you remotely move
the camera, allowing you to pan the
room via smartphone controls. We
panned the camera up to a second-story
room and back a few times. Then, we
left and went to another coworker's
office. Then, about an hour later, we
received a "Motion Detected" push notification on our smartphone. We asked
around, and everyone agreed that there
was no one left in the test house. We
looked at the video clips and saw that
motion was detected and that the camera

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine - July 2016