The Home of Now

As kids, we used to dream of a home that was computer controlled and did everything for you. In the SciFi version you called your home by some girls name and told it to do stuff like open your curtains. This is no longer science fiction with Alexa and Google Assistant. Sol what can you do to make your home smart, using off the shelf technology?

Quite a lot it appears and its not an irritating smart fridge. You can:

• Control your lighting to create moods, optimise costs, make it appear you are home. So for examle you can make sure that it helps you get to sleep and wake up naturally.
• Control your heating on a room by room basis to ensure that there are no cold spots in the house when it is occupied, but you don't heat empty rooms. Apparently this can save up to 15% in winter heating bills.
• Automate your curtains to open when you want or on demand.
• Co-ordinate home security with smart door bells (and in built cameras), night vision cameras, internal and external cameras, smart sensors etc. all remotely controlled and accessible from your phone or pad, so even when you are not at home you know who is knocking at your door. Some sensors use machine learning to distinguish between normal patterns of say noise and ab normal ones to avoid false positives.
• Adapt dumb devices to become smart, e.g. with the wemo maker.
• As well as run your entertainment around the house.

But it does not stop there. There are devices for monitoring, interacting with and remote feeding of your pets. So you can check on them whilst you are at work or out for dinner at a restaurant.

There are even smart garden products which you can use to grow herbs and other plants indoors all the year around. Using LCD lighting, thermostats, ph meters etc. they can automatically water, light and grow the plants, at 3 times normal rates to ensure that you always have a small verdant box of plants in your home.

So what's the missing ingredient? To my mind its the robot helper. A lot of companies have tried to crack this one with so called intelligent hoovers and other home buddy type robots. There's also the trend towards trying to make sexbots. But so far, these have failed to live up to the expectation or hype and come with price tags which are far in excess of capability or benefits. 

The foundations for the home of the future have been laid, but we are not quite there yet. That is not to say that we cannot get benefits from whats there with better energy efficiency, improved home security, access to all sorts of information and entertainment, automation which could help disabled and infirm people and the ability to monitor our pets, children and elderly relatives whilst we are away from home. It's just that we still have some way to go.

The Launch of Human 2.0

CES is America's annual gadget show. Whilst the tech giants such as Google and Amazon don't normally announce much here, the ecosystem of companies who exploit products such as Android and Alexa/Echo use this as a platform for launching new products. Apparently, this year's theme is Voice as a host of home automation products, exploiting voice commands and Alexa's AI capability, are using CES as the platform for their launch. Although you may be interested to know that Alexa will soon be available on Windows 10, challenging Microsoft's Cortana assistant.

Meanwhile, the latest cool device in the Wearables arena has been announced by Innomdle. This is the Sgnl which is a wristband cum watch strap which converts your fingers into a telephone receiver. When paired with a phone, it transmits vibrations down your hand to your fingers, so you can hear your phone by touching them to your ears. The device also has notification and fitness features. Initial reviews are positive and the shipping date has been announced as March.

At the same time the range of new Wearables announcements include: 

• The Eagle a wearable home theatre system from Kopin and Pico Interactive. A key feature of this is that you retain awareness of the outside world, lending it to scenarios such as automated plant control.

• Omron's forthcoming Heartguide which promises to deliver accurate blood pressure monitoring (countering reports that many smart watches are innacurate);

• Fitbit's hint that it will be delivering blood sugar monitoring technology.

So what does this mean to people looking at digital exploitation? my thoughts are this is the year when Human 2.0 gets launched. What do I mean by this, well Human 2.0 places people at the centre of automation and control of an extended network of digital assets and automated devices. So a person can control an automated production cell or a power plant with integrated feeds of information, slave AI bots to carry out standard operating procedures, and all relevant KPI information and alerts fed to him or her. At the same time, a raft of wearables will monitor and tend for the person, as it is only a short step from wearable monitoring to automatically administering nutrition, hydration and medecines.

This means that most current concepts around Industry 4.0 need to change.