A dog wears a collar which shocks the dog when the dog, wearing the collar, gets too close to the fence.
Is there anything already existing, or something which could be jerry-rigged to work the same way for a person? By which I mean that the alarm/sound/vbration/lights/whatever are triggered by a specific being who is in possession of or wearing a specific device.
The goal is to remind a particular person to lock the door when they go out and when they come in. Always. Without fail. This person often has an iPhone with them, which might work using some kind of location-based reminders, but they also often are simply walking through the door to walk the dog, not carrying the iPhone. But they are carrying a leash with a pouch of poop bags that could carry something or they could put it on the dogs collar. The point being to create a system that, once in place, will continue to work without having to remember to turn things on or off.
I’ve been looking at cheap alarm systems with two parts, a sensor and receiver, thinking that the sensor could be set to the height of the tall person passing through the door, and the receiver could be attached to the dog or or the leash, and that would come close, except that the systems I have looked at pride themselves on covering a fairly large area,both in terms of how close to the sensor motion has to be in order to trigger the receiver, and in how far part the sensor and trigger are from each other. What I am seeking is something that operates in a fairly narrow area on both counts.
The distance issue is also problematic for the iPhone location reminders, since it seems (thus far, I’m still looking) that “location” encompasses an area probably several hundred meters in every direction, so that the alarm will go off either too soon or too late to be useful. Given the crazy accuracy of modern technology, you’d think you could narrow it more.
Anyway, I’m very much hoping someone of you can come up with something great for accomplishing this. (Remember that anything involving relying on the party in question’s ability to remember anything misses the point: if the party were capable of remembering things effectively, the setup would not be needed to begin with.)
Not to go past a certain point/place – easy. To remind someone to do something is a lot tougher. Best bet would be some basic buzzer that sounds any time the door is opened and hope they remember what the tone/sound means.
Can i?
Yes, but how acceptable is electrocuting the subject in question?
It usually takes quite a number of 40,000 volt shocks to disposition a human being to do something on a blindly repeated basis.
Leave the iphone be, we dont want to damage it.
I can affix an NFC tag to the keys themselves
Well, when people are wearing electronic ankle bracelets because they’re on house arrest, there IS an alarm that goes off when they get within a certain distance of going out of range, so it’s certainly possible. That is, you would hear the alarm, which mean you were crossing or about to cross the threshold.
Now if this person is so far gone that that alone won’t trigger the “oh, lock the door” memory, then maybe instead of a bell or a whistle on the alarm it could be programmed to say, “Lock the door, lock the door.”
Yeah, these are guesses. I don’t know. Go ask Alexa.
Replace the door lock with one that has a spring-loaded latch, so the door always locks when closes. Goal accomplished.
And that 's a standard hardware item, available at Lowes, Home Depot, etc., pretty cheaply. No need to jerry-rig something, depend on carrying phones, attach something to the dogs leash, or anything like that.
This, except I would do one with a keypad lock so you can’t accidentally lock yourself out. They’re pretty reasonable now. Check ebay, I’ve gotten good deals on door knobs there. Changing our door hardware is super easy, it will just take a few minutes and a screwdriver.
I’d be worried about locking myself out. For more money, you can replace the lock with one that can be locked and unlocked remotely, or with a smartphone app.
I’d like to have more information on the problem that leads to the OP’s requirement.
Is it
(a) a case of a person who is so unreliable at tasks like locking the door when leaving that they need to be backed up by a technical fix, or
(b) a person of average reliability but who cannot bear the residual doubt of whether they have done the tasks this time, and who needs reassurance by a technical fix that would not have allowed them skipping the task this time?
In other words, is it a case of (a) a scatterbrained person or (b) a compulsive person?
If it’s (b) I’d like to share one remedy that I have come up (being mildly compulsive myself) and that uses the iPhone mentioned by the OP: when I leave for vacations, I carry on my iPhone a number of timestamped photographs of sockets (plug pulled), switches (off) and the apartment door (closed).
A low-tech solution that also covers tasks that cannot be photographically documented would be a pad of checklist forms that are checked off with (crucially) a field to be filled out with time and date.
But be careful – many of the new electronic ones aren’t very sturdy, according to Consumer Reports. And given the recent problems reported with Internet-connected objects, I’d be cautious about depending on a lock controlled by a smartphone app.
But that would depend on the person being able to remember the combination.
I don’t see the need for Rube Goldbergian iPhone/alarm sensor/poop bag contraptions. Just make up a couple signs that say LOCK THE DOOR in giant black letters and stick one on either side of the door at eye level.