Automating standalone smoke alarms for early remote notifications

摘要

House fires can cause severe damages to property and even cause loss of life. Although complex fire detection systems are commercially available but generally standalone smoke detectors are utilized in domestic environments to indicate fire. Standalone smoke detectors ring alarm when they detect smoke and give an early warning to anyone present in the premises. One major issue with such smoke detectors is that they cannot be connected with other systems and hence can cause delay in taking appropriate action. In this paper we present a novel application of fire notification to remote parties. We propose that existing hardware like microphone and speakers from a desktop system can be linked with ordinary standalone smoke detectors to make a computer agent who can call and send notifications to someone in case of fire. The prototype of the proposed system has been developed by utilizing existing smoke detectors and well-known software like Skype, Media Player and Excel. The paper also presents the evaluation of prototype for its response time. The proposed solution takes very less effort to configure as well as it requires no change to the existing smoke detectors.