How much does your mother know about you? Does she know how much exercise you get, whether you took your medication, and if you slept well last night? A new connected home and health unit, called Mother by French company Sen.se, could know all this about you and more. She looks like a mod Matryoshka with a glowing eyes and a Mona Lisa grin. Acting as a hub, the Mother connects to Motion Cookies (four are included), which are small sensors that can be programmed using a simple app to measure or track a whole variety of things around your home, such as how much activity you get to whether and when your kids brushed their teeth.

Mother sends alerts, too, by email, text message, voice calls, or even just by making a noise herself, to let you and your family members know about these different activities being tracked. She’s an unusual and slightly expensive companion ($299), and while it’s tough to recommend buying one at the moment, especially while the online dashboard is still in beta, there’s definitely something intriguing about the kit. If you’re interested in having a connected home, but live in a place that’s impossible to network (a rental, for instance), Mother is a very good second choice.

While Mother is fairly easy to set up and use, it does take a little tinkering to adjust all the apps and Cookies to collect data and alert you just right. But that’s half the fun.

How It Works
Out of the box, Mother is easy to set up, with written instructions that include plugging the device into a power outlet and connecting it to a router via an included Ethernet cable. The Mother signals she’s connected properly through her eyes, which light up, or blink if she’s not connected to the Internet.

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Hooking up Mother with cords and cables is a piece of cake. Enabling and programming the four included Motion Cookies to track various aspects of your life takes a little more effort. Each Cookie requires a coin cell battery (also included, plus one spare battery), which are simple enough to slip into place. The Cookies are color-coded and have unique names. Mine are Brisk Cupcake, Thin Mochi, Known Loquat, and Young Damson. My Mother’s name is Josefa, which is printed on the base.

If tracking only four things in your life doesn’t seem like enough, you can buy additional Motion Cookies and connect up to 24 of them.

One enormous benefit: You can change a Cookie’s job at any time. Say you track your activity for a month or two, and then realize you’re not even paying attention to the data anymore. When fatigue sets in, you can reprogram the Cookie and make it do something else. That flexibility adds a lot of value to Mother.

The Mother and Cookies communicate over their own network. They use a proprietary radio standard developed by Sen.se on the 915MHz frequency band (in North America) or 868MHz (in Europe). According to the company, Motion Cookies and Mother have a range consistent with a home Wi-Fi network. Considering that Mother is literally tethered to your router, that means Cookies should be able to communicate with Mother from any place in your house you get a Wi-Fi signal. In testing, however, I found it a little more complicated than that to make sure the Cookies and Mother were communicating, as I’ll explain in the next section.

What the Cookies Can Do
As you continue setting up the system, you’ll spend at least 10 minutes programming the Motion Cookies, choosing their purpose from a list that’s available online. The programming all takes place inside the Sen.se website(Opens in a new window), where you create an account and have a dashboard to monitor activity and make changes. The website is pretty user friendly in walking you through the remaining setup. There’s also a mobile app for iOS and Android called Pocket Mother that lets you manage the sensors and alerts associated with them, too.

At present, your options for the sensors are:

• door monitor
• sleep sensor
• presence, or knowing who is home
• fitness tracker (pedometer)
• medication monitor
• “cartoon,” which adds sound effects when an object with a Cookie attached to it moves
• temperature monitor
• toothbrush monitor
• “check,” which tells you when an object moves (such as your nightstand drawer)
• battery monitor for the Motion Cookies themselves, and
• coffee pod counter, which works with any pod-based machine such as Keurig and Nespresso.

While that’s the full list of apps at the moment, more are in the works, including an app that lets you monitor when your houseplants need to be watered, and one that senses when you drink water and can remind you to hydrate more frequently.

What’s It Like?

Also included in your Mother kit are some accessories for the Cookies, like putty and Velcro straps, so that you can attach the sensors where they need to be.

The medication monitor is my favorite application. As you set it up, the app asks what kind of container you have for your meds (blister pack, pill box, bottle, etc.). It then knows how much motion and what kind of movement is associated with the patient taking her dosage. If a pill bottle is simply picked up and put back down, the sensor and app do not recognize it as a valid intake, although it will still record the motion and tell you that the bottle moved. You can set the times of the day when medication should be taken, and enable notifications—email, on-screen app notification, text message, voice call, and so on—to remind you if you forget. It’s highly useful for monitoring medication intake of other family members, too.

What’s It Like? Assigning My Four Cookies
I set up a bottle of Vitamin D pills by attaching a Cookie to it, and the first night, Mother recorded my intake appropriately, which I could see in the app. The next day the weather was sweltering, so I moved the pills to the refrigerator. For the next two days, Mother didn’t record an intake because, I’m assuming, the pill bottle never strayed far from the fridge, which has a stainless steel door. The bottle was perhaps 40 feet away from the Mother, in my kitchen where I get a Wi-Fi signal just fine, but the wall and refrigerator door just didn’t let the signal through. So I relocated the bottle to the living room next to Josefa for a day, and the previous days’ intakes finally did show up. That’s a nice perk: Cookies can store some historical information on them in between syncs. Still, I realized I had to adjust the location of the Cookies to make sure they were able to sync with Mother freely.

I mounted a second Cookie to my front door to monitor when it opens. The developers warned me that metal doors can interfere with the communication, and that it helps to buffer the Cookie with a piece of cardboard or wood (which I did). The door monitor worked once or twice and then became very unreliable, not recognizing several times when I opened and closed it. Back to the dashboard! I dug into the settings and increased the sensitivity level to the highest setting—there are three options. It worked, but now I get a few alerts each day when it seems the wind or my dog jiggles the door, so I might try the medium sensitivity setting next. It takes a little bit of trial and error to get some of the Cookies right.

The third Cookie went on my bed under the fitted sheet to track my sleep. The instructions say to place it about chest height on your mattress. From the bed, that Cookie synced pretty well. My only issue here is that I typically wake up, take care of a few things around the house, and later return to make the bed. The jostling of making the bed is registered by the Cookie as my final rustling before I wake up (I’m having this same issue with another mattress-based sleep tracking system, so the problem seems fairly common). Again, it takes some configuring to get right.

My fourth Cookie became a motion tracker, counting the number of steps I take in a day, like any other fitness tracker on the market. The Cookie fit easily in my pocket or in my purse, but it was easy to forget about it in either of those locations. Unlike other fitness trackers, which tend to be either wristbands or tiny clips that fit on the front of a bra strap, the cookie is a flat little biscuit. I didn’t want to attach it to my keys, because sometimes I take walks without them, and in the end I never figured out the best solution for letting Mother track my daily activity.

A Quick Connected Home
I love that Sen.se Mother is both a health and wellness system—with its ability to track medication intake, sleep, and activity—and a connected home device, alerting you when doors open and close or when your coffee supply is running low. It’s a fun kit for people who like to tinker, and a great way to dip your toe into the connected home fad without networking your entire house. If you don’t have time to tinker, though, this is not the product for you just yet. Give it a few more months to mature. But if you revel in making adjustments and learning by trial and error, Mother will certainly keep you happily busy.