Photo: Jeppe Mølgaard

Student designed mini alarm to boost security at Roskilde Festival

Entrepreneurship Innovation and product development
There was great interest in the presentation of a mini alarm designed by three DTU students to protect the belongings of festival guests from theft.

Every year, many festival guests become victims of theft. Mobile phones, music players and even six-packs of beer is exposed when left in the camping area. Three DTU students are now aiming to fix this problem with the start-up Alarmified. Together, they have developed a miniature motion-detection alarm that can be fastened to your belongings.

“Our alarm can’t stop all thieves, but we are convinced that it will scare away the vast majority of light-fingered drunk people. Hopefully the shock will make them reconsider their actions,” says Andreas Villadsen who is a student of the master’s programme Design and Innovation and one of the three founders of Alarmified.

The massive turnout of people wanting to get their hands on a mini alarm at the Alarmified release party seems to indicate that the guests of this year’s Roskilde Festival https://www.roskilde-festival.dk/ really want to protect their belongings. All eleven prototypes were gone in just three minutes.

“It is really great that so many people are interested in our project. Now we look forward to receiving feedback from the people who got an alarm today, so we can hear what they think of the product once they have used it,” says Andreas Villadsen.

Not just for festivals
The concept for the mini alarm was developed by students of the Design and Innovation master’s programme Daniel Vorting and Andreas Villadsen and DTU Electrical Engineering bachelor’s programme student Andreas Væring about a year ago. The idea came from an experience where the computers of some of their fellow students were stolen while they were out getting coffee.

“We started thinking about how we could have stopped the computers from being stolen—perhaps they should have been chained to the table, or they could have asked people nearby to keep an eye on them. And then it hit us: What if the computers were equipped with an alarm? Like in a car. If someone touches it, the alarm will sound,” says Daniel Vorting. Alarmified’s vision for their security solution goes beyond Roskilde Festival.

The goal is to ensure that laptops, bicycles and other personal belongings can be left unattended. But Alarmified is not quite there yet.

“We are taking Alarmified to Roskilde Festival in order to investigate the demand and to get feedback on our product. We present a functional prototype, but it does not yet meet the requirements we set for the product. So we look forward to hearing the feedback from the festival guests hoping they will be able to point us in the right direction regarding the final functions of the alarm,” says Daniel Vorting.

The three students are planning to release their mini alarm on the market within the next twelve months. 

Roskilde Festival powered by DTU students

  • In 2010, Roskilde Festival and DTU entered into a formal collaboration about using the Festival as a future laboratory and create innovative engineering solutions to some of the Festival challenges.

  • The students will earn five ECTS points in the course of the project period. The collaboration has also ensured that DTU students behind the start-ups Volt, DropBucket , Kubio (Danish website), PeeFence, and GLØD have had a platform for testing their technology before they started their businesses.

  • DTU’s own coverage can be followed on dtu.dk, Facebook, and Instagram.

DTU’s journalists are present throughout the Festival. For more information about the projects and interviews with students, contact Tore Vind Jensen, +45 3026 7710, tovi@dtu.dk