Sen.se, pioneering towards an Internet of Things

               Sen.se is an interesting little tech startup to say the least. The company’s slogan is simply, “The meaning of life”, and indeed they hope to bring more meaning to everyday life with their sole product, the Sense Mother. Mother is a smiling, effigial device that uses an array of multipurpose sensors, called “cookies”, to passively track and analyze data from many aspects of an individual’s life. While its cookies feed it information as they are triggered, Mother accumulates and sends this information to Sen.se’s cloud via a wired internet connection. Users of Mother can check up on their online “Senseboard” to see Mother’s interpretations of their daily activity. For instance, they would be able to see the total distance that they have walked and how many calories were burned for that day, just like a pedometer, or they could even see a breakdown on how often they had brushed their teeth. Users can even tell Mother about things that they would like to improve on, and then Mother will be sure to add gentle, yet assertive comments of encouragement to their Senseboard reports if the statistics are not reaching their personal goals. Right now, Sense Mother can be ordered on Sen.se’s website (https://sen.se/store/mother/) for around $300, including four cookies. Mother can, however, support up to twenty-four cookies working simultaneously and has specifically-tailored programs for tracking walking, coffee consumption, the presence of other people or pets, oral hygiene, door usage, medication diligence, area temperature, sleep patterns, and the access of “secret” or otherwise personal belongings. Mother is still in a very early stage and Sen.se plans to expand the range of special functionalities that the platform can support in the future.

                The vision at Sen.se is to have a Mother in every home, whether that home is occupied by a single person or an entire family, to help people manage and improve their lives. The Mother’s persistent internet connectivity means that users will always be able to check on their Senseboard no matter where they are or what device they are using. However, if some of the Big Brother-esque (Big Mother?) marketing phrases Sen.se uses aren’t eerie enough, this easily will make some people paranoid that the (very personal) information being stored on Sen.se’s cloud could be jeopardized. Sen.se does, of course, ensure that your data is for your eyes only, and that you can delete it from the cloud at any time.

                Sen.se’s Mother certainly has a lot of room to grow with new features and programs that can help users get some perspective on their lives. Already, it has compacted some existing tech solutions for self-maintenance (like pedometers and simple thermometers) into a single, strange little package. I would definitely like to see how systems like Mother will evolve to help form what is becoming an “Internet of Things”. That is to say, we may one day be interacting with a worldwide network that is much stronger integrated with the real world in various tangible ways. Devices will truly focus on users and users’ reality rather than the other way around.