Girton Labs

SenseBulb is a very low power lightbulb, with a difference - it can read sensors and recognise gestures, and even SMS your phone to tell you when something's wrong!

Apart from domestic and business uses, it can also help Altzheimer's and dementia patients.

SenseBulb is quite simply a completely new way of thinking about lighting. It's very economical: it uses LEDs for amazingly low energy consumption. But it does something your existing light bulbs can't - it thinks for itself.

Its novel no-contact sensors can detect incidents such as a door left open for too long, an intruder out of hours, or a fall in the bathroom. When they do, SenseBulb can send a text message to your mobile phone to warn you that something's up.

It can recognise gestures too. For example, a hand waved at the light can indicate "Help!", causing a carer to be alerted by SMS.

An alert typically takes only 15 seconds to detected, sent and then be received by a mobile phone under experimental conditions. Any SMS-capable mobile phone can be used to receive messages. This technology, SenseDirect, has been developed exclusively by Lyndsay Williams of Girton Labs. There is no dependency on Microsoft PCs, emails or personal computers. All that is required is a SenseBulb, and mobile phone. You set up SenseBulb using an SMS message from your mobile phone; no PC required. On many landline networks, such as BT's, SMS messages can also be sent to landline phones, using text to speech conversion to provide a voicemail message.

SenseBulb's SMS sending has been tested on the UK's Vodafone, Orange and O2 networks, on both GSM 900 and GSM 1800, and should work on most other countries' mobile networks.