The Findable Keyring

The Findable Keyring is a small aluminium tag about the size of a key, with one LED and a very small speaker. Inside is a capacitive sensor that detects the touch of skin. The moment the keyring reaches a hand it begins to beep, flash amber and vibrate. Left lying anywhere at all, it is completely silent and completely dark.

Nobody asked for this. The real problem, finding keys you have lost, is a hard one: it needs a radio, a network, a charged battery and a phone that has not also gone missing. The Findable Keyring solves none of that. It needs a sensor and one coin cell, and the cell lasts eleven years, because almost all of the time the device is doing nothing whatsoever.

The strange part is what people use it for. There is a particular kind of worry that goes like this: you are standing in the doorway, you cannot remember whether you picked up your keys, and your hand is already in your pocket holding them. The keyring answers that instantly. It cannot tell you where your keys are. It can tell you that you already have them, which is a different question and, it turns out, a far more frequent one.

One customer wrote in to say she had stopped losing her keys altogether. Asked how, she explained that the noise is so annoying that she now hangs them on the hook the moment she gets in, purely to make it stop. The manufacturer has quietly adopted this as the product's principle of operation.