Having previously brought hyperlocal weather information to your smartphone courtesy of its Weather Station, smart home maker Netatmo is moving indoors with its latest gadget.
Called Healthy Home Coach, the company’s newest connected device wants to optimize your indoor living conditions by analyzing air quality, humidity, temperature and noise — and then making suggestions about how these can be improved, via a mobile app.
In essence, it is a bit like an Amazon Echo that is less concerned with playing your music and buying you, well, products from Amazon, and more with improving your life. While we have yet to get our hands on one, it is a neat concept, which speaks to the overall Internet of Things mission of quietly optimizing our surroundings on our behalf.
“We spend most of our time indoors,” Catherine Jolivet, Product Manager for the Healthy Home Coach, told Digital Trends. “However, we hardly know our indoor conditions, and we keep on guessing how the situation is instead of actually knowing how it really is. We wanted to empower parents so they can create a healthier environment for their kid and actually know about the environment.”
There are no shortage of devices that will tell you your indoor temperature, but some of Healthy Home Coach’s other metrics are usually harder to read. Anyone who lives on a busy street, for instance, will know that loud noise quickly becomes part of our daily lives and we only notice it — and the effect it has on us — when we finally spend time in a quieter place. The same is true of things like air pollution, which can be a sign that you are in a poorly ventilated area.
To that end, the device does not simply make observations, but also targeted recommendations, in the same way the Apple Watch will tell you to get up and move around every so often. For instance, if it is too humid, the Healthy Home Coach will advise you to turn off the humidifier, or to open the windows and bring in some fresh air if the air quality’s not good.
“The advice is presented in a very straightforward app,” Jolivet said. “The colored background gives [users] a quick overview in how healthy a room is. The advice is displayed in the app to tell them how they can better the environment. The app also sends notifications when something can be improved.”
Healthy Home Coach is available beginning on Tuesday, retailing at $99 from www.netatmo.com, as well as Lowe’s, Best Buy, Home Depot and Amazon. It is compatible with both iOS and Android.