SMART HOMES

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SMART HOMES
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What is a Smart Home?
Smart homes are where a single button controls
lighting, heating, security, music, memory clocks
and voice prompts - in fact, everything digital
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POSSIBLE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

• Imagine a home in which films and TV programmes
  can be played on any screen in the house without
  wires trailing across floors a home in which
  smart video recorders copy your favourite shows
  without being pre-programmed, to playback
  whenever you wish.
• Imagine all your families' music stored on one
  device, but available wherever there are speakers
  in the house.
• With rising broadband speeds and connections, the
  rise of wireless networks, and cheaper more
  powerful machines in homes, it is getting easier
  to realise the smart home dream.

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POSSIBLE FUTURE DEVELOPMENTS

• Homes that are smart are not just about being
  able to send pictures and video to different
  rooms.
• They are also about the more mundane technologies
  in life, such as heating ad lighting, and
  security technologies.
• In the future, you may never have to worry about
  forgetting to switch off the lights or locking
  the front door when you leave home. Central
  locking for homes, for example, could be all
  controlled through key fobs in the near future,
  for instance, or even through biometrics
• If you had an unexpected visitor at home while
  you were at work, the system would contact you
  via e-mail, text message or by calling you.

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Common Network

• In the past, different devices used different
  formats and standards, which made it difficult to
  unite all your devices on a common network to
  share information.
• But all that changed when the newly-formed
  Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA) set down a
  list of common principles.
• The umbrella group of more than 145 firms,
  including Microsoft, Intel and Sony, is working
  to ensure that everything from your pocket
  computer to your PC and hi-fi will be able to
  interact.
• That can only happen when the devices communicate
  over a network using common standards.

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Helping The Elderly

• By 2050, according to UN estimates, about 20 of
  people will be aged 60 or over. In developed
  nations, the figure could climb as high as 33
• Here are some of the things being developed to
  help the elderly
• Persuasive mirrors this manipulates images of a
  person in real time depending on what they have
  been doing all day.
• Connective tables this uses video-conferencing
  and projectors to let people play games such as
  draughts or chess even though they were in
  different locations.
• Shared scrap books this lets individual family
  members contribute images, messages and video to
  a single electronic journal that anyone could
  look at and flick through.
• Interactive pictures
• Activity monitoring

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Helping the Elderly cont

• The first "Smart" house for the elderly in south
  Norfolk has opened.
• Features in the new smart home at Diss, South
  Norfolk, are designed for older people with
  memory or mental health problems to help them
  stay independent.
• County council social services aim to help people
  stay independent in their own homes rather than
  move into care.
• All the equipment and communications technology
  has been funded by the European Union.

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The Smart Pot

• The days of withered and dying houseplants could
  be numbered as British researchers come up with a
  self-watering plant pot.
• The smart pot, which monitors moisture and
  temperature levels, has won a Best Invention
  Award from the BBC programme Tomorrow's World.
• The computer-controlled smart plant pot is wired
  up to the telephone line and alerts its owner
  them via a bleep, alarm or even a song if
  readings are too low.
• Worried plant owners can check on their precious
  green friends from anywhere in the world and can
  programme watering via their telephone keypad.

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COST OF LIVING DIGITALLY

• According to research by US digital home
  consultants, The Diffusion Group (TDG), more than
  half of US households are interested in some sort
  of home control system, if the price tag is less
  than 200.
• TDG also found that global home networking is set
  to grow from 35 million households in 2004 to
  more than 162 million by 2010.