Your home will be your new guardian. Yes, it is already a protector, the one that safeguards you from inclement weather and external entities, and also comforts you after stressful hours at work. However, the homes that I am telling you about will be almost living entities that will think and act autonomously to give you the best living experience and protect you like a womb does.
At present, we need to switch on the air conditioners, do trial and error for setting the right temperature, check for the stock of essentials in the home, clean the place quite often and fill in the containers for water. The future won’t ask demand all of that from you. Your home, or let me call it “Smart Home”, will be a fully-functional autonomous system that will be adaptive enough to the external environment and will take care of all your needs and chores, with just timely updates on the completed tasks, the ongoing activities and the pending ones. The smart home of tomorrow will be no less than an intelligent unit that knows how to take care of itself and its inmates. Yes, the roles of the cared and caretaker are going to get completely reversed.
Wearables to control ambiance
Your wearable devices will be the new caretakers that will work in collaboration with the home appliances to alter room ambiance for elevating your mood. Suppose you are feeling stressed and your smart watch picks up the trigger signals from your pulse rate, body temperature, sweating pattern and fidgeting of hand muscles. This will trigger a proactive approach for stress management. The smart watch shall instruct the air conditioner to alter the temperature to a little lower degree and instruct the room freshener to do the needful to initiate passive aromatherapy. The curtains will be instructed to control the light entering the room to induce the right lighting for relaxation, and the same can be executed by the artificial lighting systems in the room. All the devices connected on IoT shall function seamlessly together to give you the best environment to work.
Even when you are relaxing a bit or taking a nap after work, the body parameters will be interpreted by the smart watch. Once it detects that you are going to have a nap, the lights will be dimmed, temperature will be lowered further and an alarm will be set for an hour or so, depending on the historical data on your nap’s duration.
Smart curtains to monitor air quality
The curtains of your rooms are the first one to come in contact with the air flowing from outside through the open windows. And those long sheets of fabric may soon transform from being just a veil for the rooms and an accessory for aesthetics, to being the intelligence behind the air quality in your rooms. The smart curtains of tomorrow can very well be interwoven with air quality sensors that check for the amount of various gases flowing inside. The smart curtains will check for the levels of toxic gases, particulate matter and other contaminants in the air and a comprehensive report will be created. The same will be shared with the resident of the smart home on a daily basis.
Smart curtains will be much more relevant for people in metropolitan areas, where the air quality index shows worrisome reports every other day. Residents of the metropolitan cities will be in much greater need to keep a tab on the air quality around their home, so that they can alert their smart communities to take appropriate actions.
Inventory monitoring and automated order placements
Your smart home will also relieve you of the pain of checking inventory of essential goods in the home, like groceries, toiletries, cosmetics, fruits and vegetables, and all other items that need attention on a regular basis. Your smart refrigerators enabled with computer vision will keep a check on the quantity of each vegetable and will pre-order any item which has its stocks dwindling. The order will be sent to online grocery sellers and the precise quantity will be ordered based on how much you have quantity you asked for in previous orders. Based on historical data of your preferred vegetables, ongoing season and nutritional aspects of vegetables, the order will be placed with your health and tentative date of arrival in consideration. The quality of the food will also be monitored inside the refrigerator and the shelves, and regular notifications on food quality will usher in food intelligence.
Similarly, IoT sensors will keep a check on the quantity of liquid soap left in your bathroom, the depleting level of cosmetics inside the dressing table drawers and the stock of cereals and pulses inside large containers. It will, however, remain to be seen how many articles get connected to IoT network, since we cannot have every small jar or spoon having a sensor embedded in them. The judicious use of IoT sensors and the network will be a topic of intense discussion and planning.
Bots to keep the smart home spick and span
We already have floor cleaning bots to take care of the household chores revolving around sweeping the floors with mops. However, the floor is not the only place that gathers dust. The interiors of drawers, cabinets and enclosures also accumulate dust and can be the breeding grounds for fungi. Many a times, even you would have pulled out a long-forgotten pair of trousers or a once-charming piece of shirt just to find that it has been invaded by mites and fungi.
Sensors that monitor biological activities will check for the presence of fungi spores in the atmosphere inside the enclosures. Moreover, air quality monitors will also check for levels of humidity, temperature and pressure and the moment it detects an ambient environment for fungal growth, it will alert the smart owner resident demanding for a cleanup of the enclosure.
Similarly, sensors will find out if some piece of furniture is gathering too much dust and if the furniture’s location must be notified to the bots for cleaning. The neatness and hygiene of the house will be fully autonomous.
Water purity always on check
The water flowing through the pipes in your home will be continuously monitored for its quality. Any slightest of anomaly detected in the quality of the supplied water will not only be notified to the resident, but will also be matched with the data collected by water quality sensors of other homes in a hyperlocal sustainable community. If all sensors show the anomaly at the same time, the water supplying authority will be alerted and a grievance on behalf of the community or society will be logged into the government’s grievance portal. The issue ID will be notified to all the residents of the affected community.
Sensor data will also help to identify where exactly the anomaly began, in order to pinpoint the location of water contamination. In case the contamination is found only in one home, then the resident will be notified and an immediate booking will be set up with the nearest plumber at a time when the home owner is available. Home owner will be notified through a voice message and the owner will have the authority to approve or cancel the booking.
Final thoughts
The smart homes of tomorrow will need no technology that has not been invented yet. With the use of the current cutting-edge technologies, smart homes can be brought to reality and smart sustainable communities can be established. The homes of tomorrow will be fully-functional and fully-autonomous intelligent units that take their own decisions enabled by artificial intelligence. Our homes will become more mature in their role of a protector and caretaker, and we will soon be living inside a thinking unit. The walls, the furniture, the appliances and everything else will be connected to the fine mesh of Internet of Things, and smart homes will together giving rise to smart sustainable communities.
