Innovation: Who Made That Smoke Alarm?

Jens Mortensen for The New York TimesIn the early 1960s, Duane Pearsall tinkered in his engineering lab with a machine he called a “static neutralizer” — an ion generator designed to control static electricity in factories and photo labs. But when one of his technicians lit up a cigarette, a meter measuring the ions went haywire. Pearsall realized he’d just hit on a low-cost, low-power method for sniffing smoke. During the next decade, he and his team developed the SmokeGard, which hung from the ceiling and made a noxious noise whenever it sensed a fire. Soon, smoke detectors were in most homes in America and had saved hundreds of lives. Yet they could also be irritating. “You have no way of knowing whether it’s operational unless you set fire to your house,” wrote one newspaper humorist in 1977 of a cheap smoke detector he bought in a local store. “Merely holding the smoke detector in your lap while you watch Farrah Fawcett-Majors is not a true test.”

You can now push a button on smoke alarms to test whether they’re working, but the button is usually out of reach. The plastic puck, so perversely hard to control, has inspired several anti-fan pages on Facebook. Hundreds of people shared their rage at the way when the battery runs low it would chirp merrily as you lay in bed wishing it would die. “You’d hear it in the middle of the night: beep, beep,” says Tony Fadell, an industrial designer known for his work at Apple on the iPod. “Then the family comedy would ensue.” In 2010, Fadell co-founded a company called Nest to take aim at what he calls the “unloved object” in our homes. The smoke detector struck him as an obvious target for redesign. Fadell and his team noted that people particularly resented the way smoke detectors bully us in the kitchen — it feels as if we’re being shrieked at by an unreasonable husband or wife. “You’re like, ‘I’m just burning the toast!’ ” Fadell says. A new device had to be able to distinguish a wisp of smoke from a dangerous fire. In a nonemergency, it needed to tell you, “ ‘Hey honey, I smell something,’ ” he says. And so his Nest Protect alarm reacts to cooking smoke with a suitably low-key alert, saying, “Heads up!” in a woman’s voice. To turn off the alarm, you wave your hand underneath it or control it with your phone. That, says Fadell, is like telling the machine, “Honey, I got this.” The Nest Protect has many moods, which it conveys with a blush of colored light: “When it glows green, it’s saying, ‘Everything’s working just fine.’ If it glows yellow, you just wave at it, and it will say, ‘Batteries are low,’ ” according to Fadell.

But this cheerful smoke detector costs almost 10 times as much as the cranky plastic disc you can pick up from the hardware store. And — heads up! — if you neglect its batteries, the Nest Protect will eventually start chirping in the night, just like all the others.

AIR-QUALITY CONTROL

Mark Belinsky invented a “smart air monitor” called the Birdi that sniffs for smoke and also reports on pollutants and allergens in the home; it has just become available for preorder.

How did you hit on this idea? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, my grandmother was heating her home with her gas stove, releasing dangerous amounts of carbon monoxide into the air. I wanted a device that would call her to explain the danger and would also warn me. Nothing like that exists, and so in May my friend and I built the prototype at the Big Apps hackathon in New York. We lit a fire underneath a circuit board, and then everyone in the audience who had signed up for our app got a phone call telling them there was an emergency. People were excited because they saw this idea could work. From there, the orders started rolling in.

You’ve designed the Birdi so it will monitor the air pollution in the room, as well as sniffing for smoke and carbon monoxide. Why? We thought it could do more. Of course it’s there to detect smoke, but why not have it also sense everyday problems and make my life better? It should be able to detect particulate matter and tell you not only what’s in your house, but also what’s in the neighborhood and your city.

And how’s your grandmother doing? Things turned out O.K. for her. Once the lights came on, so did her heat.

Searching Big Data for ‘Digital Smoke Signals’

But the office in Manhattan is not dedicated to the latest app. It is the base camp of the United Nations Global Pulse team — a tiny unit inside an institution known for its sprawling bureaucracy, not its entrepreneurial hustle. Still, the focus is on harnessing technology in new ways — using data from social networks, blogs, cellphones and online commerce to transform economic development and humanitarian aid in poorer nations.

“We work hard, play hard and tend to stay well-caffeinated,” said Robert Kirkpatrick, who leads the group. “This is an exercise in entrepreneurship.”

The efforts by Global Pulse and a growing collection of scientists at universities, companies and nonprofit groups have been given the label “Big Data for development.” It is a field of great opportunity and challenge. The goal, the scientists involved agree, is to bring real-time monitoring and prediction to development and aid programs. Projects and policies, they say, can move faster, adapt to changing circumstances and be more effective, helping to lift more communities out of poverty and even save lives.

Research by Global Pulse and other groups, for example, has found that analyzing Twitter messages can give an early warning of a spike in unemployment, price rises and disease. Such “digital smoke signals of distress,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said, usually come months before official statistics — and in many developing countries today, there are no reliable statistics.

Finding the signals requires data, though, and much of the most valuable data is held by private companies, especially mobile phone operators, whose networks carry text messages, digital-cash transactions and location data. So persuading telecommunications operators, and the governments that regulate and sometimes own them, to release some of the data is a top task for the group. To analyze the data, the groups apply tools now most widely used for pinpointing customers with online advertising.

“We’re trying to track unemployment and disease as if it were a brand,” Mr. Kirkpatrick said.

Global Pulse is small, employing 11 people in New York. Seven more people work at a laboratory in Jakarta, Indonesia, that opened last fall. And Global Pulse is hiring for another lab in Kampala, Uganda, to open this fall.

The research labs are initially working on demonstration projects to show the potential of the technology. “But the larger role of Global Pulse is as a catalyst to foster a data ecosystem for development, bringing together the private sector, universities and governments,” said William Hoffman, an associate director who leads the data-driven development program at the World Economic Forum, which has worked with Global Pulse.

Its United Nations pedigree helps Global Pulse serve as an impresario for data-driven development efforts. “Global Pulse has been central in raising awareness,” said Alex Pentland, a data scientist and director of the Human Dynamics Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “And it is a trusted party in an area that is sensitive for many governments and companies.”

The group traces its origins to the 2008 financial crisis and concerns about how the economic pain would sweep through the developing world. But as Secretary General Ban Ki-moon of the United Nations said in a speech, “Our traditional 20th-century tools for tracking international development cannot keep up.”

Global Pulse is intended as a 21st century answer to that problem. It was set up in 2009, as an innovation arm in the office of the secretary general. Mr. Kirkpatrick joined in early 2010, began assembling a team and emphasized tightly focused projects and rapid experimentation, while traveling the world to spread the data-for-development gospel at conferences and in private meetings.