Imagine a world where you come home from office and find dinner ready in the oven, the television playing your favourite series, the air-conditioning adjusted at the right temperature and the lighting just perfect to help you destress from a long day of work. This isn’t a scene from a fiction movie, but the power of a smart home.
Smart homes use concepts of automation and connectivity to provide home owners with comfort, convenience and security. Simply put, a smart home is an ecosystem where home devices such as appliances, lighting, air conditioning, television and entertainment units, computers and security systems can be connected to each other and to you, over the wireless network, ensuring seamless communication and easy access. Today, as the home owner of a smart home, you can easily control everything from your smartphone. You can also customize the schedules and timing of your home appliances. And this is just the beginning. As more and more people opt for smart homes, the market and technology will continue to evolve.
Smart homes can help you in saving not only energy, but also money. With smart home technology, there is an endless potential to optimize the use of smart gadgets and appliances. For instance, smart air conditioning systems can ensure cooling and regulate temperature in an efficient manner. Lights can be switched off or dimmed when not in use. In the future, smart home technology can also predict your usage patterns and needs, thus optimizing and conserving energy as well.
Smart homes also add an additional layer of security. Connected lights, motion sensors and cameras can provide you the much-needed piece of mind while you are asleep or away. Features such as facial recognition are already making headway into mainstream home automation. Further, by incorporating automation, mundane tasks of home care and maintenance are taken care of, giving you more time to spend with your loved ones. By building an ecosystem of robust lighting, entertainment systems and digital assistants, smart homes also help in building an ambient atmosphere. This provides a relaxing space for home owners and an excellent opportunity to entertain guests as well.
With the integration of sophisticated technology based on Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), smart homes are not only here to stay but also are slated to evolve further as well. We foresee the integration of more and more devices into the connected network and the expansion into smart spaces. Smart parking and smart streetlights would be available in the foreseeable future. Improved personalization and efficiency would be possible as AI algorithms successfully predict our choices and needs based on our usage patterns. The next generation smart home devices will go beyond the typical digital assistant, and could one day soon include smart cookers and smart pots. Integration with delivery ecosystems will ensure ingredients are delivered straight to your pantry. These smart devices will not only cook, but also will assist and guide us in cooking and even let us operate them remotely, building a self-fulfilling ecosystem of the future.
All in all, if you’re worried whether you locked the front door today, it’s definitely time to invest in a smart home.