Technology
Every home safety product promises peace of mind. The difference is in what sits inside the box. Here is how sensea is built - and why it notices more, bothers you less and never needs a camera.
kinds of measurement in one small device
cameras and microphones
heat pixels, each one factory calibrated
raw radar channels read in every frame
times a second objects are tracked
raw radar samples analysed every second
01 · The core
Many smart-home sensors only measure and send. A server somewhere else does the interpreting, so the raw sensor data has to leave the home.
sensea has a powerful processing unit inside, with many times the processing power of the chips in radar modules and typical smart home devices. It reads the radar's full raw signal and the thermal readings together and works out what is happening in the room, on the spot.
Radar and thermal readings are analysed inside the device, within seconds, without waiting for a server.
The raw radar signal and the live thermal readings.
Summary readings such as presence, posture and room climate, plus confirmed alerts and quiet observations. For sudden events, the heat clip. Shared only with the people your family has chosen.
Video, images of a face, sound or conversations. No voiceprints or fingerprints, no advertising IDs, and no way to tell who someone is: sensea can tell one person from two, never which person.
02 · The problem
Radar is superb at sensing movement, in the dark and without a camera. But it has a weakness that rarely makes the brochure: now and then it sees something that isn't there. Engineers call it ghosting.
You may know it from your car. A modern car's parking assistant or distance control occasionally warns you about an obstacle that doesn't exist. If the automotive industry hasn't eliminated it, no single radar will.
We tested radar sensors from different manufacturers. Every one of them produced ghosts, even in an empty room. A robot vacuum was enough.
In detail
Why it matters. Nothing is worse than an alert at 3am, the fear, the phone calls, the drive over - and then finding out nothing happened. After a few of those, families stop trusting the alerts. So radar can never decide on its own. It needs support.
03 · Sensor fusion
Radar knows where something moves and how far away it is. Thermal knows whether it is warm like a person. Vibration knows whether something really hit the floor. On their own, each can be fooled: a curtain in the wind, a radiator, a radar ghost.
sensea combines them, so a movement only counts when there is a person-shaped warmth in exactly that spot. And because it knows both the direction and the distance, it also knows how high that warmth is above the floor, which is how it tells a person sitting from a person on the floor. The fusion gets better with every update.
04 · Verifying
A top reason families give up on home safety products is false alarms. So sensea never relies on one sensor: radar, warmth and vibration run at the same time, and nothing reaches your phone until their signals agree.
3 patents pending. Our detection and verification methods are filed with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA).
A sudden change in posture that does not fit the normal pattern of the day.
There is actually a person where the movement happened - not a curtain, not the cat.
When a moment comes with a real physical impact, the vibration sensor adds it to the picture.
When the signals agree, sensea alerts your circle, with a heat clip.
In detail
This is sensor fusion: the sensors run side by side and their signals are weighed together, so radar alone never triggers an alert. Because it runs on the device, the checks happen within seconds, without a round trip to a server.
Detection and verification methods: three patent applications filed with the German Patent and Trade Mark Office (DPMA).
05 · The last check
Sensors can reduce false alarms. They can't reduce them to zero - and we won't pretend otherwise. So we made one thing non-negotiable from day one: before anyone jumps in the car, a person you trust can see what happened.
The heat clip is that last line of verification. You look, you judge, and only then do you mobilise your family or your circle - or relax, because it was nothing. See what the heat clip shows
06 · Radar
Most products use the short summary a radar chip reports: a few detected points. Because sensea has a powerful processing unit, it reads the full raw radar signal and does the interpreting itself, the way the radar was designed to be used.
That detail helps sensea follow one person from two, tell standing from sitting from lying, and tell a person from a pet. And every detail it can tell apart is one less false alarm.
In detail
Every frame, the radar delivers 16 channels of raw signal. sensea clears away the static room, finds the direction of every moving thing with the same array-processing maths used in phased-array systems, groups the reflections into people, works out whether each one is standing, sitting or lying, and tracks them from frame to frame, twenty times a second. All inside the device.
07 · The parts
We didn't build sensea around the cheapest parts that would do. We built it around the best ones we could find for each job. All on one circuit board of our own. Together they give sensea eight kinds of measurement and not a single camera or microphone.
Japanese precision radar: 60 GHz millimetre-wave with 4 transmit and 4 receive antennas, digitised at 53.3 million samples per second. Range resolution under 4 cm, a field of view of 100° side to side and 110° up and down, and people followed from arm's length to beyond 5 m.
Senses
160 × 120 thermal sensor: 19,200 heat pixels across an 88° wide view, behind a silicon window. 25 times the pixels of the 32 × 24 sensors common in smart-home devices. Far too coarse to ever show a face.
Senses
Broadcom BCM2712 processor: four 64 bit Arm Cortex-A76 cores, LPDDR4X memory and eMMC storage. Dual band Wi-Fi 5 (802.11 b/g/n/ac) and Bluetooth 5.0 LE on a certified radio module. Built for industrial use, in production until at least 2036.
Boschs gas sensor with artificial intelligence built in. It smells volatile organic compounds, sulfur compounds that point to bacteria growth, and gases such as carbon monoxide and hydrogen, and turns them into an air quality index from 0 to 500 with CO2 and breath VOC equivalents. Its AI gas scanner can be trained to recognise new smells. Humidity, air pressure and temperature share the same 3 × 3 mm package.
Senses
A precise 3 axis accelerometer that feels sudden impacts on the floor: 8 bit resolution, 100 readings a second on every axis and a selectable range from ±2 g to ±16 g, on about 10 µA.
Senses
A 14 channel spectral sensor from 380 to 1000 nm: 11 colour channels, near infrared and a flicker detector. It tells daylight from lamp light, reads colour temperature and brightness, spots 50 and 60 Hz flicker, and works in near darkness and behind dark glass, in a package of 3 × 2 mm.
Senses
Every sensea is manufactured in Germany: circuit board, assembly and testing. We pick the best component for each job, wherever it is made.
No camera. No microphone. Nothing that could record a face or a voice.
08 · Setup
Many radar sensors in this category have to be mounted high on a wall or ceiling and set up zone by zone. sensea stands on a shelf or sideboard at normal height.
One power cable. No drilling, no technician.
Connect Wi-Fi, name the room, invite your circle.
No geofencing, no radar tuning, no drawing rooms on a map.
09 · Updates
Most gadgets are at their best the day you unpack them. sensea is the opposite. It learns the usual rhythm of the home and lets your family know when today looks different, and our engineering team keeps shipping improvements and new features over the air, automatically, with nothing for your parent to do.
Every software release is signed with Sigstore cosign, and the device checks the signature before anything runs. If it does not verify, it does not start.
Wi-Fi setup is encrypted with an X25519 key exchange and AES-256-GCM. Data stored on the device is encrypted with Adiantum under an Argon2id key, and everything in transit uses TLS.
Compliant with it: a unique identity for each device, encrypted setup, encrypted storage and a locked down system.
As many devices as your home needs - and one membership that makes them all work.