Have you ever suddenly worry whether you set your house alarm when you leave your premise? In this modern world, home security is an important element in our daily lives. However, current alarm system is either not secure or non-user friendly. There are many high technology alarm system in the market. There are some of these systems use a 32-bit or higher security code to 'disable' the system before entering or 'enable' the system after leaving by using a key chain transmitter. And it's not very 'foolproof' either. These key chain transmitters generate a ‘signal’, which can be picked up by a nearby scanner. That means that the signal can be captured and duplicated and, for all intents and purposes, the alarm system is defeated. Most of the alarm systems are keypad whereby it is not secure. This is because using a digital sequence generator, which generates all the security codes in sequence, can breach the alarm system.

Thus, our bluetooth innovated alarm system will able to provide a secure as well as user-friendly system. There will be unnecessary keypads as it is a user-friendly and secure. Owner does not need to worry whether the alarm was armed as leaving the premises will just armed the alarm system with just a mobile phone. Our alarm system will be enable or disenable by the present of the owner’s mobile phone. As mobile phone now has become a necessary commodity, it is convenience to disarm and arm alarm system compare to a key fob, which is easily lost or misplace.

As security is the most fundamental importance to alarm system, we decided to use bluetooth technology. Bluetooth technology is also intended to be secure by providing authentication, encryption, quality of service (QoS) control and other security features. We decided to use a mobile phone embedded bluetooth to enable and disable our alarm system. It is secure as mobile phone has the basic Bluetooth security mechanism which is the user's ability to choose if a device is in "Discoverable" mode (visible to other devices) or "non-discoverable" mode. Besides that, the Bluetooth address itself is a unique 48bit device identifier, where the first 3 bytes of the address are assigned to a specific manufacturer by the IEEE (www.ieee.org/), and the manufacturer freely allocates the last 3 bytes.

Associate Professor Subhrakanti Dey, Chor-Hao Ng, Syet-Yin Yong