From Laundry and Home Inventory to Energy Systems

Whether you are aware of them or not, RFID tags are starting to be deployed in items of clothingembedded discreetly in a shirt color or a waistband. The movement to wearable RFIDs is driven by both apparel manufacturers and apparel retailers. Both have a vested interest in loss control and providing a better shopping experience. The Gap, for example, is experimenting with in-store RFID-reading PDA-like devices that help shoppers match clothing with accessory items; these devices also receive well-targeted advertisements related to the merchandise. Gillette alone ordered more than 500 million tags in 2004, and Benetton ordered 80 million^[5] for trials in various stores.

^[5] http://www.computerworld.com/managementtopics/ebusiness/story/0,10801,79286,00.html.

However, the utility of RFID does not end when you leave the store. It turns out that washing machines, like refrigerators, are also a good match for RFID readers. In fact, we can identify numerous values that come from having an intelligent washing machine that knows what is sloshing around inside. A smart washer could help people avoid the classic catastrophes, such as mixing colors with whites or using the wrong temperature or cycle or even the wrong detergent. In fact, RFID could eliminate the need to have any dials or settings on the washing machine itself...it should know how to produce perfectly clean clothes based on what it senses in the wash load. Come to think of it, though, we might still have to tell it how dirty the clothes areassuming we want to divulge that information. Would you pay $100 more for such a washer? Probably not. Did you pay extra money for the end-of-cycle buzzer it has on it? Probably not. These capabilities will simply be there because the base cost of the raw components allows for it, and their utility will be far greater than a buzzer.

Interface-Less Appliances?

Might wireless appliances enable a new world of appliances that no longer have physical interfaces, such as buttons and dials? A great deal of cost goes into mechanical buttons and information lights and displays, all of which has to be manufactured to be rugged and withstand abuse (both of harsh hands and haphazard soils and spills). Manufacturers have always had to balance how many controls to expose on a device against the direct costs and the indirect costs of support and confusion to the user. Software interfaces have a luxury in that they can present less-cluttered displays but still allow advanced users to drill down into more powerful controls or diagnostics.

Some appliance manufacturers have started using computer displays for those reasons. However, those displays add significant cost. If the manufacturer could count on users to have nearby wireless access (either a home computer but more likely an advanced cell phone or PDA), they could eliminate significant cost and produce a stronger appliance. If the trend toward home wireless computer networks continues, as well as wider adoption of PDA-like devices, we may very well enter an age where we control our appliances by pulling our PDA out of our pocket (which, of course, could be just as easily controlled from any remote Web location, further realizing efficiencies and convenience). Devices in the computer world, such as Ethernet switches and disk controllers, a long time ago migrated away from any front-panel controls to a completely Ethernet-connected interface.

Another value to RFID-enabled clothing is home inventory tracking. Assuming that you own or rent an RFID-enabled or "smart" living space, and many of the appliances in it are RFID-enabled, you could stop the seemingly endless searches for things. Are my running shorts in the closet, in the washer, in the dryer, or in the clothes hamper? It is perfectly reasonable to expect that dressers, bureaus, and closets will eventually be outfitted with RFID readers as well due to volumes driving RFID-reader component costs down.

A third value is creating the right "look" for a party or night out. A computer or PDA can help choose outfits for various occasions based on which items are truly available in your wardrobe. Tied back through the Internet to the manufacturer, an "apparel-selection" program could show you pictures or symbols of the various clothing items that could be appropriate. You can peruse your clothing inventory from your office chair or while by the pool. Neat little programs are available now that can visualize an entire outfit, allowing you to mix and match items like Colorforms (especially for finding the perfect shoes). Imagine combining one of these programs with data handed to it by your smart living space. Creative Inescapable Data users will find imaginative data sources to intertwine with the new information streams.

Another third-wave vision is of intelligent control of the living space environmentboth from the comfort of your bed as well as from a remote location such as your car as you are driving home. Today, there are gadgets for your heating, ventilating, and air-conditioning (HVAC) system that enable you to remotely monitor and control your system, but those are specialty devices and have proprietary interfaces and likely require a dedicated phone line. Yucktoo snail-mailish. As with refrigerators and washing machines, your HVAC system is yearning to be connected to your standard wireless world and have easy-to-exploit interfaces.

Certainly, anyone driving back from a vacation can relate to the value and comfort of arriving home to a living space that is at an appropriate temperature (especially in the Northeast United States). We believe that consumers will want to be able to monitor and control the home environment (especially vacation homes) from any Web-enabled device and without any special hardware or hassles. The family calendar residing on the home PC could be easily tied into an HVAC system that could auto-adjust room temperatures at the proper times of the day. In the Northeast during the winter, for example, we often lower our thermostats a few degrees to save energy when we leave the house, and turn them back up when we arrive home. Using a PDA, we could tell our thermostats when we will be home (and without specialty and proprietary interfaces from our selected HVAC manufacturer). If it makes sense to have appliances such as refrigerators connected to the Internet (as in the LG case), it probably makes sense for HVAC systems as well.

As mass proliferation takes hold, we envision legions of renegade "open-source" programmers across the Internet spending significant parts of their nights writing the most bizarre things such as closet-optimization softwareyours for free. Silly? How much time do the connected ones among us spend downloading the latest cell phone ring tones already, and for virtually no advance of efficiency? Or look at the proliferation of personal home Web sites created by Average Joe with rich graphics, interactive blogs, local weather insertion, and live video of their town center. History has shown us that people will dabble with technology if it is easy to access and offers just a modest amount of utility or fun. In the Inescapable Data world, a little dabbling for a specific value now has global reach and global value because of the pervasiveness of the devices and standard interfaces; we expect this to further accelerate ad-hoc usages and developments.

Intelligent Lawn Sprinklers

For years, more expensive homes have had automatic lawn sprinkler systems. Resource-conscious systems attempt to avoid watering if Mother Nature has recently done her job. Little collection tubes or dishes are located somewhere in the yard, and the system skips watering if there has been enough recent rainfall. Such systems are horrendously inaccurate and they have no concept of anticipated or forecasted rain. Some newer systems now use soil-moisture devices that are pushed into the ground and use wireless technology to transmit watering needs to the control box. The newest systems have satellite connections that receive local weather information, including humidity, rainfall, and expected weather and rainfall for the particular square-mile geographic area.

HydroPoint (www.hydropoint.com) is one company making such a system. Daily, its system receives weather information from National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) satellites gathering data from a vast array of weather stations across the United States. The HydroPoint system then analyzes the data and retransmits (via satellite) watering information to subscribers' watering controllers, achieving significant efficiency and conservation. Finally, this is moving in the Inescapable Data direction as multiple date sources are combined and turned into specific information (wirelessly). However, these newer advances are specialty devices and possibly proprietary technology. The Inescapable Data world will welcome standard wireless networking, and it should be straightforward to connect to Internet-based data sources and the watering controller itself without specialty technology or barriers.

As researchers looking for Inescapable Data in the home, we want to know whether these examples are the stuff of sci-fi or the requisite creature comforts of the not very distant future. We believe that those who suffer from extreme asthma, for example, will value a more intelligent HVAC system that is even tied in to the state weather-pollen forecast. Diabetics will value an overall food management system that tracks sugar and carbohydrate consumption. Homeowner's living in areas that can experience temperature extremes will likely enjoy optimizing utility usage to lower costs and extend component life. But we also believe that we enjoy end-of-wash buzzers on our washers, lighted refrigerator doors, and timed-bake ovens. In perspective, those are truly minor features compared to what will come naturally, and likely for free, in the Inescapable Data world.

We believe that manufacturers will detect demand for these kinds of capabilities, and that demand will come first from niche market applications and then blossom into mass adoption as the market matures and individual unit costs drop. After that, our vision holds that once everything in the living space is emitting data, and the conduits are in place to carry that data to processors that can intelligently decompose it and turn it into information, surprising new uses for these technologies will emerge. In much the same way that it does not take sophisticated programmers to create award-winning Web sites, it won't take programmers to leverage these technologies into the incredible improvements in our lives either.