Smart Homes

I believe that smart homes are a goal worth striving towards and can make our lives easier and less of a hassle (if any of us felt as though we had hassles in our life beforehand).

Others say that we have gone too far in the way of smarthomes and we need to “get back to the basics”, we need to stop with this advancement of technological homes before it becomes more than we can handle, if you do not believe that it already has. There are many parts to this new phenomena of the smart home, but it is in no way a new idea. It has been seen in movies and TV shows as a prediction for the future, and while it may look different it may not be all that far off. I personally conducted a short survey with three short questions that sound similar. While they sound similar the thought behind each question is different.

These question were given to six people, none of which have smart homes, and asked them their interpretation of what a smart house is. The questions were as follows below. One, what does it mean to have a smart home? The majority of people said, “It does stuff for you”, and while this is true it is a bit more complicated than that. The best answer that I received was a very in depth answer from one of the people I surveyed that seemed to know more about what they were talking about. They said “To own a home, synced to a device to perform our mundane tasks for us”, very close to what I had found, but not exactly.

Two, what qualifies a home as a smart home? This could be rephrased as, what is the transition that makes the home you live in a smart home? (This will be extended upon in the next question). Two of the better answers I had received for this were “Your home can help you with communication, helping you around the house, and financing” and “The qualification would have to be less human intervention”. While these are both good answers I understand that it is essentially hands free communication, and the ability to check the weather and traffic reports. The majority of the people that I have surveyed said that “It does stuff for you”, most likely because they saw the question as the same from the last. Finally, three, to be a smart home, is it the contents of the home or the home itself? Two of the people I surveyed may have not necessarily understood that it was an either, or question and said both, however the vast majority of the people I had surveyed stated their belief that it was, in fact, the contents of the home that made it a smart home, and that the home itself cannot be a smarthome unless it was built specifically to be one, with all of the technology built in.

This is the question that I have been trying to refute and find the answer to. Is it really on a “house to house basis”, or as you add on more to the house, building more into the house, does that not in turn become the smart home itself? I had done research into this and it was not easy, I had found that all there were, were more arising questions. What exactly qualifies as contents of the home and what, as you add onto it, become part of the home? A mirror that is mounted on the wall, once it is screwed in and unremovable by bare hands, is that then still a small portion of the contents? You can create a “smart mirror” at home and have it give you weather updates as you brush your teeth. You can have a fridge that tells you the time and the amount of calories in your fridge and in each meal. Almost all of these, brought by Samsung, and all of these just add to the debate and rise more questions about the specifics.

When do we draw the line? We all have our choice as to the home we want to live in, and we all have the availability, but it all seems like it comes down to price. I live in a home, and if you are reading this, you probably do to. I have to leave the question with you. What do you think?