DIGI TOOLS FOR DOMESTIC BLISS
How smart home devices can make your day more relaxing, more secure and help save you money, writes CATHERINE MASTERS
Picture the scene. You’re heading home so you push a button and your house springs to life.
Later, you’re having a romantic evening. You push a button and the dining room lights dim and dreamy music starts to play.
This is a smart house, connected by the Internet of Things, where “things” have internet connectivity.
If you are really rich you might spend hundreds of thousands of dollars getting your house just right – the rest of us might make do with popping down to a retail store and buying a surround sound system on special.
For Nikki Harris, co-founder and director of Auckland-based company Intelligent Environments, a truly smart house is one where instead of having numerous apps to control different aspects of the home, there is one system to control it all.
The Auckland-based company defines an intelligent environment as “one that responds, almost intuitively, to the needs of those using the space”.
While the firm specialises in commercial buildings, like hotels, Harris says it gets pulled into the top end residential market where homes have mega-wealthy owners who not only want to impress with the latest technology but who want to remove hassle from their lives.
“For example, a popular thing is for people to have a goodbye scene – so literally as they walk out the door they push one button, and a button could be on a switch, it could be on a remote, it could be on their phone, it could be all sorts of places, but by touching one they’re closing the house down.”
In this scene, all non-essential circuits are turned off – the heat pumps in the teenagers’ bedrooms are stopped from wasting heat all day and the iron is not mistakenly left on.
Another scene is “the poltergeist”. This one turns on the lights in the evenings so it looks as if someone is moving through the house.
“This whole Internet of Things – this is what it’s all about,” says Harris.
You can have a smart fridge and other smart features, she says, but a smart home is about integrating them and having an over-arching control system.
The very rich are after the wow factor but also the practicality of smart features, she says.
“They want the situation where somebody drives down the driveway and the landscape lighting is on and the fountain is playing and the music comes on – they want things like that to wow their guests.
“But after the wow factor has worn off what they really enjoy are the things they don’t really have to pay attention to.
“It’s the stuff that makes life more convenient and also that gives you that feeling of security wherever you happen to live.”
How much it all costs depends on what you want, but Harris tells clients who want everything to budget 10 per cent of the overall building project costs. A fully smart house might be pie in the sky for most of us now but technology marches along and gets cheaper.
Samsung, for example, already has SmartThings which is the tech giant’s overarching IoT (Internet of Things) platform.
It is already embedded into many of the company’s devices, says Todd Selwyn, the New Zealand head of mobile.
One of these is the Family Hub refrigerator (on sale in New Zealand) which has cameras so you can use your phone to check what you need while you’re at the supermarket.
And when devices talk to each other it means you can change on your phone the washing cycle on your washing machine, or answer the front door on your fridge, Selwyn says.
While that’s great for Samsung to Samsung devices the next evolution is being able to use the SmartThings system to control products from other companies.
That technology should be in New Zealand before Christmas, says Selwyn. “It’s pretty much limitless what you can do. The devices are pretty generic so you can programme them whichever way you want – in the past you used to have to be a bit of a computer guru to be able to do that sort of stuff but now you can just do it.”
Selwyn says watch this space because where the Internet of Things meets AI (artificial intelligence) you then get the Intelligence of Things and here you will find your routines are learnt.
“Once these things start to get to know that you come home at half-past-five, because your smart front door unlocks at 5.30 every night, it can start to recommend different routines to you.
“All these devices, as they evolve through the software, get a lot smarter with t AI integration.”
”After the wow factor has worn off what they really enjoy are the things they don’t really have to pay attention to.”