The Broadband Home

Consider the top technological advances over the past 100 years developments in airplanes, antibiotics, television, computers, the Internet. In this context, the housing industry today is where the auto industry was in the 1950s. Although the technological revolution has affected most aspects of our lives, our homes have been left behind. But that will change with the introduction of intelligent appliances that work together to complete tasks; for example, self-cleaning surfaces will make life easier power-generating fuel cells will save money and visual reminders will help protect you and your family.

As broadband access alternatives are deployed, an interesting phenomenon occurs. The bottleneck shifts from the local loop to the inside of the home. As you bring in more broadband services to the home your smart house you require a networking solution within the home to distribute that information among the various devices that will be making use of it and among the various settings within the home where you might want to access the network and its services. This network domain is referred to as the home area network (HAN).

The Smart House

Ideally, the smart house will use computers to assist its inhabitants in living a safe, healthy, and happy life. The smart house is not yet a perfected reality, but the age of robotics might make that happen. For the time being, the smart house allows you to integrate and manage your home, your work, your learning, and your leisure activities. The smart house can take over many home management tasks, performing them automatically, and actually learning from them. And, most importantly, the details of the smart house are transparent you can't see how it's actually working and doing what it does.

Who can benefit from such an infrastructure? Well, certainly people who want to make the most intelligent use possible of their time, people who appreciate convenience, people who care about saving energy, people who care about security, people who care about their health, and people with functional limitations, including those who are physically disabled, aging, or extremely busy.

The smart house supports its inhabitants in many ways. It can wake you in the morning at a specified desired time. It can make sure your shower is at what you consider the ideal water temperature. It can ensure that you leave on time for work, school, or social engagements.

The smart house can also provide you with information as needed. It can handle routine daily information, such as keeping schedules, providing music, and video-tracking a person moving around the premises. It can do special assignments, such as handling to-do lists, home management information, and disaster planning (as well as management of those disaster plans). It can help in the area of nutrition and health management by working with you to plan and prepare good meals. For instance, it might look at your nutritional requirements and health needs, preferences, and interests, and then explore menu possibilities for you. It could also assist in determining the availability of ingredients by procuring the required ingredients, organizing the necessary cooking resources, and synchronizing multiple tasks, including preparation. It could also help manage food by managing purchasing schedules to match your nutritional requirements and planned activities, as well as take advantage of bargains. The smart house could also assist in food storage by maintaining inventory control, managing leftovers, and dealing with waste.

When you embed intelligence into a device, you create an interesting new opportunity for business. That device has to have a reason for being, and it has to have a reason to continue evolving so that you will spend more money and time on it. To address this challenge, device manufacturers are beginning to bundle content and applications with their smart appliances. For instance, a smart toaster might have the capability to, on a community basis with other toasters in your neighborhood, bid on bread over the Internet, achieving a greater discount for you and all your neighbors.

The smart house also provides a communications infrastructure for its inhabitants, so it can support telephony, television, radio, and intelligent appliances that chat with each other, along with Web browsing, online banking, and education. It supports communications between the house and family and other household members, friends, the community, coworkers, service providers, and emergency services.

The smart house can help with household chores, and it can look after your things. By providing security, it can help keep out intruders, protect the inhabitants from unwanted interruptions, monitor a range of smart devices within and outside the home, and provide outsiders access to your home when and where needed. It can protect you from harm. For example, if you leave the stove on, LCDs can display the offending burner to warn you. Or the house could alert you if the roof has sprung a leak or if there is mold growing in the ducts.

The smart house can also manage energy; with electrochromic windows each kilowatt of energy used to darken the window saves 30 kilowatts of air conditioning. This feature is especially important because managing energy will be increasingly important. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, 22 trillion kilowatt hours of electricity will be needed for the world by 2020, representing a 75% increase over existing kilowatt hour levels.

A smart house can help ensure that you are educated by bringing you information that's pertinent to your professional profile or to your educational plan. And it can certainly help make sure that you have some fun for example, by preparing your entertainment menu for the day.

In a smart house, anything can be automated. You can call the house from your car to fill the hot tub. You can time outside lights based on longitude and latitude so that they're precisely aligned to turn off and on with sunrise and sunset. Intelligent appliances can learn from your purchasing habits and build intelligence to keep you informed and to care for you. In essence, all these smart things that become automated will be self-aware and self-managing. As the smart house becomes a reality, homes will begin to take on personalities of their own, and you just may have to learn to live with them!

Intelligent Appliances

So, what goes into a smart house? A variety of infrastructures are involved in the smart house, including sensors, fiber optics, and solar energy. One key aspect of a smart house is smart components, such as doors, windows, drapes, elevators, security systems, heating and ventilation, sprinklers, hot tubs, and showers. Smart components can also be found in furniture for example, smart beds, drawers, cupboards, medicine cabinets, wall screens, tables, and breakfast trays. (I'm not making these up; these are actually examples of items that exist today!) Intelligent appliances are a great new area of smart components; in the near future, you are likely to encounter smart refrigerators, ovens, alarm clocks, washers, dryers, books, cameras, TVs, entertainment system, and picture frames, among a multitude of other things.

The smart house has many human-centered interfaces that support multimedia, multimodal, and multisensory information flows. The smart house obviously requires telecommunications services in the form of broadband access, for which xDSL, coaxial cable, hybrid fiber cable, broadband wireless, Powerline Telecommunications, or Gigabit Ethernet could be used.

A critical component of the smart house is the HAN, which, as discussed later in this chapter, provides the invisible infrastructure that links together all the smart things in the house. It enables control of those devices from anywhere, and it enables control of devices either individually or in groups. One day, a home will have computing networks that supply every room of the house with automation and data. Analysts predict that over the next several years, an increasing number of households will become totally interconnected, with a HAN joining their communications, entertainment, and domestic appliance equipment. In the broadband era, bandwidth starts at home!

When the network is in place, the dynamics of the home begin to change, and this means that computer accessories need to be built into everything that you normally associate with the home. So, for example, today we have many manufacturers of kitchen environments. Whirlpool, Telia, and General Electric are among those producing smart refrigerators, smart alarm clocks, smart coffee pots, and smart microwaves all of which talk to each other. If you set your alarm clock for 6:00 am, it knows that it needs to tell the coffee pot to make coffee for 6:45 am. If you get a call from the airline reservation system at 3:00 am, the message goes to your alarm clock, telling it that flights tomorrow morning are being delayed by an hour. Because the alarm knows you want it to, it can set itself to wake you an hour later than planned. And, of course, it contacts the coffee pot, requesting that it reset itself as well. Smart microwaves today are Internet connected, and they can go out actively throughout the day to seek new recipes that are known to be appealing to you; they provide these to you, along with an assessment of your pantry inventory at home that tells whether you have the needed ingredients for the new recipes.

ICL and Electrolux were two of the first companies to introduce smart refrigerators. These smart appliances have volume-based sensors that can tell when an item is running low and thereby put the item on your shopping list or automatically place an order online. They have scanners that can read bar codes, so that they can place items on a shopping list. They have LCDs that can enable you to Web surf or conduct communications or messaging activities through that panel as well, saving on space in the kitchen. And very soon, these smart refrigerators will have artificial noses sniffers that will be able to determine the freshness of your foodstuffs based on smell. If your milk carton is full and has been sitting there for two weeks, the refrigerator can take a quick sniff and determine that the milk is sour and discourage you from consuming it and it can order you a fresh carton at the same time. A smart refrigerator can also have a display monitor on the outside door that allows you to surf the Web from the kitchen, looking for recipes, investigating pricing, engaging in communications, and using different types of applications.

All sorts of low-cost smart tablets are being created intelligent appliances that are not full-scale PCs, but which are slimmed-down versions that allow you to Web surf and take care of some rudimentary tasks such as scheduling and messaging. Such tablets are now being built into kitchen cabinetry, again to conserve on space. Some are designed for just collecting recipes and depicting cooking preparations or panels that are designed to control the various home systems. Several appliance manufacturers are introducing Internet appliances that replace all those little sticky yellow papers that you to stick on your fridge to leave messages for family members and to remind yourself what to get at the store and to do different activities. Now all this information can be very neatly contained in one very smart, attractive device that even alerts you to the fact that important messages have been left.

Intelligence is being built into doors so that if a painter is trying to come in to paint your living room when you're at work, when the painter rings the doorbell, you can see a view of him so you can decide to let him in by remotely activating the door. You could continue to track the painter's activities throughout the home by using remote eyes. Of course, those remote eyes would also facilitate communication among families and friends; for example, grandparents could observe their grandchildren at play with their parents.

Wide-panel TV screens are expected to become available within two or three years, and they may even reach a price point that many of us find realistic. These TVs introduce a new window to the world that involves not just entertainment information, but a platform for gathering educational and other resources. Interactive wide-panel components are also being introduced onto mobile platforms, which enable you to progress throughout the home, viewing information as you go.

You might at first think a wired breakfast tray seems odd, but the first thing many of us do in the morning is check our e-mail, so now furniture is being developed that incorporates keyboards and screens into other everyday functions such as dining. Coffee tables have been designed such that when you open the lid, you have a full-scale PC, complete with a high-resolution screen and all the input/output devices you might need.

Within five years we're expecting marvelous new equipment that's specifically designed to act as a medical assistant. For example, sensors will be built into toothbrushes so that as you brush your teeth, your mirror will display your temperature, heart rate, blood pressure, cholesterol count, and so on, and make recommendations for menus or exercises. Sensors that can measure electrolyte levels are small enough to fit into a toothbrush. Now we're working on sensors that will be able to measure protein levels, aiding in the ongoing maintenance of cardiac ailments. Other developments will also contribute to this hospital-at-home. For instance, smart socks are being developed; they are fiber-optic-cabled socks for people who have diabetes or spinal cord injuries and who suffer from ulceration in their feet. The smart socks will detect whether there are weak spots and where they might be occurring in the feet, proactively managing the condition. There's also a suggestion that a melanoma monitor might become part of a normal shower installation, and every time you take a shower, the monitor will take an image so that over time it can compare the images and determine whether there are any changes in the size, coloring, or texture of any spots you may have.

Another combination of a smart piece of furniture and a health care device is the smart bed. This bed would monitor your vital statistics while you sleep, and in the morning it would provide you with a summary of how you performed throughout the night, perhaps including the fact that you tossed and turned at least ten times and therefore might need to do some stress-reducing exercises. Your virtual personal trainer (a Web agent) would then appear to facilitate a round of such exercises for you. Stuffed toy pets are being developed for the elderly. They can monitor vital signs, and if something's awry, they initiate communication with whomever has been designated to be informed of any changes in health status.

Soon, when you get up in the morning, there will be hundreds of little sensors that will all be engaged in somehow managing some part of your life and most likely reporting on it! The privacy implications of pervasive computing are huge, and it seems that the best advice is to assume that there is no privacy any longer and protect your personal data with forethought.