Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Smart home an intelligent home that would
  provide fully automated 21st century living, with
  multifunctional robots
• Automation has successfully conquered industry
  and working environments
• Leisure time, domestic tasks and household
  management have remained untouched

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Adoption of electrical domestic appliances follow
  the process of commoditisation
• New appliances expensive, unreliable and bought
  by the wealthy
• the richer a person is, the more he is willing
  to pay for less benefit. Therefore, it is to be
  expected that the rich will be the early adopters
  of new technologynew technology can be used to
  buy more free time.
• Lynne Hamill The Introduction of New Technology
  into the Household, Digital World Research
  Centre, University of Surrey, UK (2000)

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Technological improvements, reductions in the
  cost of manufacture and competition all help to
  reduce the cost
• Once the market for the rich has been saturated,
  profit margins will be cut or cheaper products
  will be produced for the mass-market

• Electric washing machine
• Introduced by the Hurley Machine Company, Chicago
  in 1907 (model shown left c. 1925)
• Early models were unreliable and expensive
• Easy to sell as they eliminated or replaced
  household chores
• Price of automated washing machines finally
  dropped in the 1960s, helped by the introduction
  of Seeburg timers

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Introduction of electrical domestic appliances
  did not reduce labour, only drudgery
• 1950s woman could complete all the housework
  that a housewife and several servants would have
  completed a decade before
• Visions of a house of tomorrow luxurious 21st

century living where housewives are finally
relieved of their domestic duties

• Vision of fully automated home and
  multifunctional domestic robot has largely
  remained untouched

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Broadband communications 50 of people in
  European households using broadband by 2005
  (IDC)
• Electroluxs Screenfridge
• Household members communicate via video-mail or
  email
• Users can surf the web
• Food management recipes, how to handle foods,
  food storage
• TV, radio and connections for surveillance
  cameras
• Digital cookbook

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• LGs Internet Washing Machine
• Combines white goods with information and
  communications in response to the increasing
  popularity of home network products
• Download washing cycles from the Turbodrum
  website

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Role of convergence
• "In information technology, convergence is a term
  for the combining of personal computers,
  telecommunication, and television into a user
  experience that is accessible to everyone
• www.whatis.com
• Every decade has a word that defines it. In the
  80s it was the PC. In the 90s it was the
  internet. This decade the key word is
  convergence
• Steve Case, AOL Time Warner

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• General public need to be convinced of benefits
  of buying multifunctional devices
• Talking with your family through the
  refrigerator? That just sounds creepy. I suppose
  people will have to stop using the fridge while
  talking to their familyPeople will have to enter
  information about food and expiry dates
  manuallyIsn't technology supposed to make our
  lives easier?
• Madhu Menon, Internet consultant
• Compromise in design designers need to
  successfully integrate two or more devices with
  restricted dimensions at a reasonable price
• Jack of all trades, master of none?

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Uniform view that the home will be intelligent,
  connected and wireless although the way this will
  be achieved, and how the home will be networked,
  differs drastically
• Television-centric
• Used for entertainment, email, online shopping
  and as the main interface
• Regarded as a communal device, clashes over
  usage
• Difficult to upgrade
• PC-centric
• Problems of stability consumer level PCs prone
  to crashing, potentially bringing down the
  entire network

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Post PC world
• Personal computing moving from the PC into a
  range of devices
• Wearable PCs
• Smart computing single board interfaces will
  use a PC processors power, reducing size and
  cost
• Change in interface from WIMP (Windows, Icons,
  Mouse and Pull-down menus) to speech and,
  eventually, physical gestures
• If technology is to be more accepted in the
  home, it must change to better suit this
  environment. A number of researchers have
  argued that this change will take the form of a
  post PC world.
• A.T. Brown, Hewlett Packard Labs, Bristol, UK

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Manufacturers need to convince consumers to
  embrace the Intelligent home
• Sceptics claim manufacturers have lost touch with
  the consumers need and appliance design is being
  driven by what is technologically possible
• The resulting products are complicated to use and
  intimidate consumers who dont understand their
  function

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
Technology offers the potential to make life
easier and more enjoyable each new technology
provides increased benefits. At the same time
added complexities arise to increase our
difficulty and frustration. Donald A. Norman,
The Design of Everyday Things Human beings
are visually oriented, hands on and curious by
nature. We may want to keep tangible interfaces
to the real world and retain at least the
impression that we know what is going on. Ian
Pearson, BT Futurologist
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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• The house of the future has engineered confines,
  presuming a digital lifestyle
• With the notable exception of the television,
  which is profoundly home grown, most new domestic
  technologies embody notions of efficiency
  designed to deliver better time and resource
  management
• Genevieve Bell, Intel Corporation, and Joseph
  Kaye, MIT Media Lab
• Designing Technology for Domestic Spaces A
  Kitchen Manifesto
• The kitchen is a social hub with a distinct
  cultural history that is to be understood before
  imposing technology on its inhabitants

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• The development of an intelligent home is not
  restricted to a connected, automated domestic
  environment
• Philips Ambient project (right)
• Ambient Intelligence as being an exciting new
  paradigm in information technology, in which
  people are empowered through a digital
  environment that is aware of their presence and
  context, and is sensitive, adaptive, and
  responsive to their needs, habits, gestures and
  emotions, merging the concepts of ubiquitous
  computing" and "social user interfaces to
  improve the quality of life

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• The project aims to create a future home
  resembling the house of the past and
  eradicating all the black boxes that feature in
  our homes today
• Example of contents
• Bathroom mirror (right) reflects your image,
  the news or weather
• Nebula an interactive projector determined by
  movement
• Audio system trigger a song by humming the tune

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
"Technology in our homes will evolve to the point
that it we don't have to 'work' to experience it.
Rather, it will understand us and react to our
needs, making our lives easier."
"In a true Ambient Intelligence environment, all
electronic features and functions are integrated
into people's backgrounds." Spokesman for
Philips
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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Aware home, Georgia Tech
• The Aware Home venture is concerned with
  addressing the fundamental technical, design,
  and social challenges of the creation of a home
  environment that is aware of its occupants and
  their activities
• The home is a network of sensors and computers
  monitoring the movements and actions of the
  household members
• It contains a vast array of gadgets, designed to
  enhance the quality of life, with special
  emphasis on the elderly

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Example of contents
• Digital family portrait (right) reconnects
  geographically distant extended family members.
• Designed to resemble a portrait, the border
  changes daily reflecting the persons life,
  providing peace of mind for family members

Gesture Pendant a necklace with a small
camera inside that allows the user to control
devices within their environment through gestures
What am I cooking? (next) vision sensors
capture information and displays them as visual
cues
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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
"It's not enough just to solve these problems in
the abstract. To really understand the problems
and challenges of ubiquitous computing, you have
to build actual environments. You have to take
aware technology and apply it to the bodythe
home." Dr. Gregory Abowd, Aware Home project
leader
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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Domestic Robots
• Assistance for the disabled
• Entertainment - Sonys AIBO that can learn
  through experience, as well as read emails and
  take photographs with its onboard camera)
• Household maintenance - Dyson (DC06 still on
  home trial - below), Electrolux (Trilobite -
  below), iRobot (Roomba - below) and Probotics
  (Cye - next)

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Progression Towards the Intelligent Home

• Challenges
• household environment is a complex mass of wires
  (resolved by wireless network), confined spaces
  and uneven floors
• Uncontrolled environment with humans interacting
  in the space
• A safe, powerful, portable power supply is needed
• Robots with AI or other behavioural complexities
  still have technical difficulties
• Economic concerns mean that design, functionality
  and materials can be compromised