Smart battery for smoke alarms takes retrofit approach
Sunnyvale, California-based Roost has come up with a WiFi connected 9-volt battery and Roost aims to make it easily smart. It plugs into any old smoke alarm to make it smart. This is promoted as a simple and elegant solution, according to Roel Peeters, the company CEO, for retrofitting your existing smoke detectors, to create a safer home. The battery connects your alarm to the Internet. In today's connected world, said James Blackwell, CTO (who is described as a wireless industry veteran with over 20 years' experience in the design and manufacture of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi systems), the smoke detector is old technology; the way we interact with our smoke detectors is not very intuitive. They don't even know the difference between night and day, he added. Nobody likes waking up at 3 am to a low battery chirp and wandering around, half asleep, trying to figure out which alarm...