Progression Towards the
Intelligent Home
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
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 technology…new
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)
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
Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
• Introduction of electrical domestic appliances
did not reduce labour, only drudgery
• 1950’s 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
Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
• Broadband communications: 50% of people
in European households using broadband
by 2005 (IDC)
• Electrolux’s ‘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
Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
• LG’s ‘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
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 80’s it was
the PC. In the 90’s it was the internet. This decade the key
word is convergence”
Steve Case, AOL Time Warner
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 family…People will have to enter
information about food and expiry dates manually…Isn'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?
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
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 processor’s 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
Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
• Manufacturers need to convince consumers to
embrace the ‘Intelligent home’
• Sceptics claim manufacturers have lost touch with
the consumer’s need and appliance design is
being driven by what is technologically possible
• The resulting products are complicated to use and
intimidate consumers who don’t understand their
function
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
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
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
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
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
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
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 person’s 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
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 body…the home."
Dr. Gregory Abowd, Aware Home project leader
Progression Towards the Intelligent Home
• Domestic Robots:
– Assistance for the disabled
– Entertainment - Sony’s 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)
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