Netatmo Welcome Camera Recognizes Faces, Alerts You When Kids Get Home

Netatmo introduced an innovative home monitoring camera at CES 2015 in Las Vegas. The Netatmo Welcome features facial recognition technology and can alert users when each family member arrives home and if a stranger enters the house.

Netatmo is best known for Weather Station, a line of products that monitors indoor and outdoor temperature, air quality, barometric pressure, relative humidity and rainfall. The Netatmo Welcome Camera is quite a departure from the Weather Station, but the company’s going after the same sort of customer base with its latest product.

There’s no shortage of home monitoring cameras on the market, but at best most of them simply send notifications to smartphones when they detect motion. These notifications can quickly become tiresome. After training the Welcome to recognize each family member, users can customize alerts. When alerts are received, users can opt to view live video via the Netatmo app.

The Netatmo Welcome can be paired with Welcome Tags, which alert users when doors or windows are opened and closed.  That way you can tell if your kids have opened the back door. While the Netatmo Welcome Tags won’t replace a proper security system, they are simple and can detect things like when the mailman drops mail off or when someone knocks on your door. The tags can be placed up to 100 meters away from the Welcome.

The Netatmo Welcome looks pretty similar to the company’s indoor Weather Station, which is great. The simple metal cylinder looks like it can blend into most modern interiors.