What Should Your Home Be Telling You?

Home. The place where you lay your head to sleep, where a roof of some form protects you. It’s where you leave the things that are valuable to you as you head off each day to live your life. If you were to strike up a conversation with your home about its day, what information would you like your home to convey to you? How would you like to get that information? These walls can’t talk.

(Infographic Source: deloitte.com)

There is a value to real time information, things you want to know about as soon as possible. Examples of this from your house would be things like smoke detection and security. You need to know right away if your house is on fire or someone is trying to break in. Critical information should be delivered using a persistent messaging system that won’t stop until you verify receipt. Think of what a great excuse you’ll always have: “I am sorry I have to leave this very exciting meeting because my home is paging me that someone is trying to break into the house.” Forget those fake phone calls and made up excuses.

Less critical conversations can also take place, informing you of what’s in the refrigerator and even information on the products inside. Imagine being at the grocery store and being able to remotely look inside of your refrigerator. Refrigerators of today feature cameras inside as well as barcode readers that can tell you specific information about products like expiration date, price, nutritional information, product reviews, and more.

With the Internet of Things, you’ll never forget the milk again.

Given these preliminary conversations, what should your house be talking to you about?

• Home Security – remote connection to video surveillance systems and sensors
• Critical information – Fire alarms, burglar alarms, leaking pipes, electrical outages and other critical pieces of information
• Home Information – Non-essential information like replacing air and furnace filters, refilling the egg tray, temperature, energy use, and pet-information
• Environmental Information – Particulate and dust levels in the air, CO2, Radon, and other harmful gas detection

All of these home information systems are available today via their individual systems. What the Internet of Things will do is provide seamless control and notification across all aspects of your home’s functions, in a single platform. This will soon become a reality, so get used to receiving text messages from your house. It all sounds useful until your house starts sending you Baseball picks and you’re forced to write a book: “Conversations with my House: Why I stopped Changing my Furnace Filter.”

By Scott Andersen