Manage your household with OCHO Pad Smart Key Tray

If you’re someone who scrambles to find your keys of a morning, or feel anxious about children arriving home safely at night, you’re sure to be impressed by the OCHO Pad Smart Key Tray.

The OCHO Pad is a smart key tray that can help keep track of the movement of everyday items. It’s the IFTT (IF This Then That) of your keys or wallet. You can indeed set up rules, such as messages, reminders, alarms, which will trigger when tracked objects come in contact with the tray. By analysing your habits, the provided app can also help make your day easier. By knowing the habits of your household you’ll be able for example to improve your thermostat or alarm settings.

What does it do?

The OCHO Tray holds things such as phones, keys, and wallets, and not only provides a way to keep things in the one spot in the home or office, but also aids users by sending and receiving customisable messages or reminders to family members:

1. Just in Time Messaging: When Matt’s keys touch Home OCHO Pad, message him “Casserole is in the oven.”
2. Phone Charging: If my phone isn’t plugged in at 10pm, message me and my husband with “Plug in your phone!”
3. Teenager Surveillance Without Being Creepy Like GPS: If Brandon’s keys aren’t on Home OCHO Pad at 11pm, sound the alarm on my iPhone.
4. Keep Significant Others Up to Date with Schedule: When Mike’s keys are taken off my Work OCHO Pad between 4:30pm and 8pm, message Rachel “On my way home. – Mike”
5. Effortless Status Updates: Check if your significant other has made it home by 6pm.
6. Keep your keys where they should be: If my keys aren’t on the tray at 10pm, send me a notification to find them so I’m not scrambling in the morning.
7. Keep track of communal items at work: Notify me when mail is taken off the OCHO Pad.
8. Social Alarm Clock : If I haven’t left home by 7:45am, sound my alarm on my phone, start flashing the lights, notify my significant other.

These eight uses is where the OCHO gets its name from (‘ocho’ being the Spanish word for ‘eight’). However, the software’s open platform means that developers will be able to do so much more with the OCHO smart key tray in the future.

How does it work?

The OCHO utilises NFC (Near Field Communication) and Infrared technology to track when items are placed on OCHO trays, as well as to send pre-determined notes to users of the device.

The colourful OCHO tags can be applied to any number of gadgets and everyday items that you want to track. After setting up the system, users receive notifications each time an item touches the OCHO Pad Smart Tray, and also have specific messages sent to the item’s owner.

When keys are placed in the tray, the system records the check-in time, stores the info, and then sends it on to be kept in the OCHO cloud database. The Tray also checks to see if there are any messages recorded for the tagged item, and sends them through if so.

Image: gizmag.com

The OCHO system is handy, in particular, for parents or other family members that want to know that their loved ones have made it home safely, as they can receive a notification as soon as a tag hits the Tray. Similarly, people who want to send either a reminder (about homework or chores) or a loving message to those in their family can also take advantage of the system’s benefits.

Messages and reminders can be pre-recorded at any time of the day or night, and then simply “pushed through” to recipients on an automatic basis. Users can also send themselves reminders, such as: “Remember to charge your phone”; or “Don’t forget to put a load of washing on”, so that important daily tasks are not forgotten after a long day at work.

Similarly, if customers want to track their daily activities (like the times of day that they leave and/or arrive home again), the system’s running history of activity on each item allows them to do so.

Ocho Pad Specs

The OCHO Smart Key Tray launched an unsuccessful bid on Kickstarter raising just shy of their $35,000 goal. If you’re interested in the design, head to the website www.OCHOPad.com and click on the “Get Started” link to sign up for email updates on the product’s progress.

Once available, the system will comprise of the OCHO Pad Smart Tray, the OCHO Mini (a smaller tray designed specifically for keys or other non-bulky items), battery-free OCHO tags for gadgets, NFC stickers or key-chains that get attached to items; and the OCHO app, the mobile interface that has the ability to be locked by parents.