Inside the ultimate smart home
DISCOVER THE CONNECTED TECH THAT WILL MAKE OUR HOMES HEALTHIER, SAFER AND GREENER.
For many of us, the term ‘smart home’brings up images of robot butlers, The Jetsons or the high-tech interface’s found built into the Stark mansion in the Iron Man movies.
But home automation is no longer science fiction. Technology that’s designed for our homes is simple to use, looks good and can make our lives easier, safer and even healthier. And don’t worry, there isn’t a clunky robot butler in sight.
What makes a home ‘smart’?
The term ‘smart home’ is used to describe a house that contains technology that connects to the internet – it’s as simple as that. If devices are connected to the internet this means they can connect to each other and be automated, monitored and controlled from your smartphone, whether you’re home or not.
So you could ask your voice-controlled
Amazon Echo to turn on your Nest thermostat and heat up your house if you’re feeling cold. Or you could get out your smartphone and fire up your Arlo Q Security Camera app on your way home to show you a live-feed of your kitchen.
With a smart home you’re asking your devices to communicate, send information back and forth and take your commands. For this to work you need devices that can connect to the internet. Nowadays, a lot of devices already have smart technology built-in. But many older devices aren’t smart, so you’ll need to buy add-ons, like smart plugs, which enable them to connect with a little help.
Smart home overload
Over the past ten years technology companies have been investing a lot of money into smart home technology. This means there’s a lot of connected tech on the market, from TVs and
thermostats to toothbrushes and hairdryers. But with so much smart tech to choose from, creating your own smart home can be daunting, not to mention pricey.
That’s why rather than make everything smart, you can decide what’s a priority for you. Because let’s face it, one person might love their smart toaster and another might find it completely useless.
Right now some of the biggest trends in smart home tech are focused on health, security and being more ecofriendly. Which one will you choose to focus on?
Better health starts at home
Advances in sensors that tell us more about, well, us, mean that people can take their health and wellbeing into their own hands more than ever before. And although you might associate health tech with activity trackers or specialist medical devices, there’s potential for it to become a staple in your new smart home, too.
The first smart product that might one day become just as important as your kettle is a sleep tracker. Many of us know that the amount of shut-eye we get has a direct impact on our health and wellbeing, which is why many of the fitness tech companies, like Fitbit, are channelling their efforts into advanced sleep-sensing tech.
A number of sleep sensors that sit on your bed or are incorporated into your bedding already exist, like the Zeeq Smart Pillow or Beddit sensor. But having tech tucked up in bed with you, no matter how small, isn’t ideal. That’s why there’s now a move to keep tech smarts that live on your bed to a minimum, with devices such as the S+ Sleep Monitor from Resmed analysing your body movements as you sleep instead.
Sleep tech becomes even more useful when it doesn’t just track your sleep but improves it. That’s why wake-up lights from Lumie and Sleepace are already popular, creating the optimal sound and lighting experience to lull you into dreamland.
However, it’s not just sleep that your smart home wants to monitor but the environment, too. The Netatmo Healthy Home Coach can keep tabs on humidity, temperature, air quality and noise, then recommend how you can create a more optimal environment in which to live.
As air pollution reaches an all-time high, environmentsensing tech is becoming more important than ever, but it can also have specific applications, like if one of your family has asthma or allergies.
Sure, weighing scales aren’t new, but now your old scales with a dial that would give you unpredictable results are a thing of the past. Smart scales, like the latest device from QardioBase, can now track body fat, water, BMI, muscle mass, bone composition, and in some cases even pregnancy.
As you’d expect, all of this data can then be sent to your smartphone and sync up with other apps to paint a more holistic picture of your overall health.
But our smart homes don’t need to do all the tracking and sensing to make us healthier. Systems that use the data we already have from wearables like Fitbit and Misfit to make changes in the smart home could be lifechanging.
Let’s imagine your Fitbit senses your heart rate is high so it adjusts the lights and sounds in your home accordingly in an attempt to de-stress you. While smart homes don’t work as seamlessly as that right now, they are not that far away from doing so.
“Some of the biggest trends in smart home tech are focused on health, security and being more ecofriendly.”