Our homes are where we spend the biggest chunks of our lives. But despite recent technological advances, they remain surprisingly dumb. Unlike your phone, you can’t talk to your home, you can’t give it instructions, and it has no idea how to meet your needs. But the same technology that’s in all our devices is gradually working its way into the family environment, and will ultimately improve or standards of living.
To be more concrete, imagine this. You’re on your way back from work in the car, and it’s a hot day. You’re sweating buckets, but when you get in, you want the temperature to be a cool 16 degrees celsius. In addition, you’d like a cold drink when you get in, as well as the door to be unlocked, so you don’t have to scramble to find your keys while holding bags of shipping,
Right now, the idea that you could do any of that seems a little far-fetched. But as it turns out, the technology to make it happen already exists. In fact, homes can be a lot smarter than most people give them credit.
The Growth Of Smart Devices
In fact, this sort of home might be in our present, not our future. Thanks to the growth of the so-called Internet of Things, the number of connected devices – or things – is on an exponential upswing. Predictions from BI Intelligence suggests that from 83 million connected devices in 2015, we could have more than 200 million by 2020, and that’s a conservative estimate. The true figure could potentially be a lot higher.
And the range of devices that are connected to the cloud/internet is greater than before. Not only are thermostats connected to smartphones, but now practically every household device has some kind of smart technology built into it. Washing machines, dryers, vacuum, cameras, refrigerators and alarm systems are all hooked up to our phones, and all collect information on our personal preferences. With the proliferation of AI, their capabilities are only going to increase.
Functions Of The Smart Home
What’s interesting about today’s smart home is that it is very different from that which was envisioned by futurists of the past. Back in the 1960s, futurists imagined that the smart home would be like in the Jetsons, where you pushed a button and just got whatever you wanted served to you by a robot butler. But the actual shape of the smart home is turning out to be greater in scope than could even be imagined in science fiction according to cityam.com
For instance, homesecuritysystem.co points out that one of the major applications of smart home technology is in the realm of security. Like businesses, homes can connect to third party companies over the internet and pass over the responsibility for monitoring their homes to them.
In the future, the price of smart devices for the home will continue to come down. At the same time, home automation platforms like Amazon’s Alexa will make it easier to interact with our homes. All told, the future is going to be very different from the past.
