If the system is armed, and Aura detects motion from someone it doesn't recognize, it will send you an alert, and can even sound an alarm. (Philip Street/CBC News)

When Taj Manku's son was around 11, he asked his father how cellphones worked.

The boy knew there were towers that communicated with the phone, but nothing in the air suggested a connection was being made.

"I said, 'Well, it's sort of a light, but you just can't see it,'" Manku recalls. 

If you could see what Manku is describing, you would see the world awash in a perpetual glow, waves of radio frequencies (RF) radiating from thermostats, televisions and children's toys. Manku calls it "the luminescence of RF," and because wireless technology is everywhere, it's more prominent today than it was in decades past.

It's this abundance of RF that Manku and his company, Cognitive Systems, has been working to exploit — and they want to use it to protect your home.

It helps if you think of all the world's spectrum like a body of water. Cognitive Systems has built a tiny cube, a home security product called Aura, that can see intruders based on the subtle disturbances in spectrum their movements make — like ripples in a lake, explains Manku, the company's chief business development officer.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/aura-cognitive-systems-home-secur...