Who here has not seen Jetsons as a kid? I know I have, and I used to love the way modernisation and automation were kept at its peak during the exhibit of these cartoons. This question seemingly has a lot of variant answers, and it vastly depends on who you ask. The idea behind the creation of smart homes is not new, and all of these technological advancements have finally given us the privilege to call us being living in the smart-era.
In short, a “smart home” is your residence which gets converted to handle things you usually would on daily basis into an automated fashion. This has got to be the simplest and the most precise answer anyone on the internet, or you know, could come up with! Now with the addition of this concept, some houses that are newly built may have the smart feature embedded into the brick and mortar, and some get added up, later on, to facilitate and suit your requirements. This is purely possible by the continuous advancement in the field of technology thus giving us control over the artificial intelligence.
Although the idea of smart homes existed for 30 years back, in reality; the smart homes came into existence just a while back. This timeline that has been observed by everyone across the globe gave the human enough time and knowledge to produce hardware’s that are not equally capable of automating things around our homes. This is just the very beginning of the “smart-home” concept and only proves what the future holds for us.
If you were like me, then no; buying a smart speaker will not turn your home into a smart home. This is just the very basic of converting your home into a smart home. I know of a few people that have connected their speakers, television sets, lights, curtains, patio gardens and what not; to form a smart home hub of a sort. This, in reality, is the essence of making your home “smart”.
LET ME TAKE YOU DOWN THE HISTORY LANE
1901 – 1920
This era marks the inception of home appliances. Although these are available in almost every household, these cannot be considered as smart. Being an excellent achievement at that particular time of the century, these products greatly revolutionised the approach of a normal human being to quickly get things done and reach out to the masses which wasn’t possible before this. The creation of electronic vacuum cleaners in the mid-1910s was a significant outbreak. I am sure, those maids that belonged to affluent families would have steam-rolled through their daily chores using the equipment’s that the technology brought in.
1966 – 1967
This particular bracket of time marks the launch of ECHO IV and the infamous KITCHEN COMPUTER. Wondering what that might be? ECHO IV is the very first smart device ever built by a human. This device was capable of managing and monitoring home temperature, ask questions from the children if they wanted to watch the television; something that modern NET NANNY Applications are now capable of; turning devices on and off around the home.
Early 2000’s
The technological revolution really hit the shelves for the consumer during this particular bracket in time. Smart devices and home automation products began being adopted by the masses. Introduction of domestic technologies, home networking solutions and gadgets started appearing all over the place, and people were enthused how it benefitted them big time.
Present Day
Today’s smart home is well beyond that technological cycle. These advancements and gadgetry is now a common thing and is at everyone’s disposal. People now are more inclined towards adopting the smart-home concept and always are eager to enhance their personal and home security along with going green. This involves the inception of security cameras, gadgets that would alert you when someone intrudes in your private space and automated alerts being sent to the nearest reinforcements, etc. All in all, the modern smart homes are well equipped with the automation that can easily take off the manual hours one deployed to carry out the tedious chores.
The modern trends and the advancements in the smart-home concept includes but is not limited to automated lights, thermostat adjustments using your smartphones, scheduling your appliances to turn off and on and turning up a notch when required, email notifications/SMS/calls being imitated from the physical appliance and device to alert you in case your certain set filters and parameters are violated. All in all, modern smart home is equipped with all the latest artificial intelligent devices one could ever imagine in the mid-’90s.
This modern-day equipment does offer you not only the great comfortability but also scalability. Obviously this doesn’t come at a little cost, and one is required to invest a decent sum of money in going completely smart. But that doesn’t mean that it is not doable. You can start off by connecting your home with a security and surveillance system. Once that is in place, going completely smart with it would require you to interlink devices such as doorbells, connecting the lights in your porch and inside your home. This would give you the comfort of being home alone, and you can comfortably rest and enjoy your day off from work while knowing that your smart devices are in action and would alert you in case there is a suspected intrusion.
WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLDS FOR US?
This question hypothesizes that technologists claim the modern and future smart-homes would be somewhat similar to what “THE JETSONS family” used to have. It would be wrong to say if the future cutting boards that are brought into our household would be fully automated, automated molecular cooking devices and so much more.