Friday, October 17, 2014

Dropcam - Training for home alone

I bought a Dropcam Pro - $200 at Amazon. It’s the market leader in home monitoring, I’ve been considering it for a few months. Not for home security reasons (though that’s nice), but because some special needs teens have been known to get into trouble when home alone.

The idea is we can turn on the camera in the living room, and listen to yells throughout the house. There’s two way audio, do we can holler too. The audio is non-duplex with a few second delay, so it doesn’t work for a conversation.

Installation was very simple, you can use a Mac, Windows, or Android/iOS device to manage setup. I didn’t sign up for the monitoring service - I just need to turn it on when I want to check up on the kids. It’s easy to turn on or off from the iPhone app.

I’ll posts more on how well this works in practice. The hope is that this will provide just enough external reinforcement to help #1 manage at home with a sibling present. When #1 moves into his own place this will be useful there too. Seeing how well this works I now wish I’d bought one for use with my mother.

See also

Update 10/26/14: The Dropcam is working well. Just knowing it’s present is a calming influence. Recommended.

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