What is a smart home?

A key feature of a smart home is being able to control it remotely, wherever you are, with a touch, your voice or iPhone.  The promise is that by updating household devices and connecting them to Wi-Fi, you’ll save money on bills and time on chores as well as making your home more secure against intruders.

For example, activate your smart sprinkler remotely to water the lawn in the hot summer. Doorbells with built-in video camera and wi-fi will alert you instantly, wherever you are in the world, someone is at your front door, so you can talk to them. And with a camera in the fridge, you can see its contents from the supermarket, so you need never run out of milk or essential ingredients for your recipes.

Smart devices

Smart devices can operate autonomously or be controlled, often from an app on your smartphone or tablet. There’s a huge range of products available to buy and they fall broadly into the following categories:

• Home security – door bells, wireless cameras, motion sensors, alarms and door locks, garage door openers.
• Lighting & energy – light bulbs, switches, plugs, thermostats, radiator valves, ceiling fans, air conditioners, pool heaters.
• Appliances – fridges, washing machines, ovens, vacuum cleaners.
• Entertainment & fitness – TVs, HiFi music systems, fitness trackers, bathroom scales (measure weight, fat content, blood pressure).
• Gardening – sprinklers, auto-mowers, garden sensors (to measure, pH, moisture levels, temperature and nutrients), flood lights & weather station.

But it can be tricky sorting out what’s a genuinely useful advance as opposed to an expensive gimmick. For example, some smart thermostats can vary the temperature in different rooms of your house. Genius? Well, maybe. What’s so hard about walking across the room and twiddling the knob at the side of the radiator?  

Perhaps a more useful, labour-saving device is the robot vac. You can put your feet up while it maps out your home and sucks up any dirt. Like the Daleks in Dr Who, the robot can can’t climb stairs, so you’ll need to carry it upstairs.

Smart home hubs

Smart home hubs act as a docking unit for smart devices such as lights, plugs, door lock and security camera. And you can control them by using voice commands as well as swiping on your phone. The home hubs are marketed as your own live-in assistant to make your life easier. You can ask it to play your favourite songs, give you a weather report and switch the lights off or on. Most home hubs are sold with a selection of connected items such as motion sensor, smart lights, cameras, radiator valves and plugs. They are surprisingly cheap between £100 and £200, and you can then add other compatible gadgets – prices correct in December 2018. Obviously, the home hub can’t take out the rubbish or sort the laundry as a human assistant might. However, there are already ‘service robots’ available to buy which can do chores, including sweeping and washing floors.  

Before buying the latest and smartest home gadgets, make sure they are compatible with your phone, tablet and any smart hub you own.

How much does it cost?

Setting up your smart home can be as simple and affordable as putting a home hub in your kitchen or a lot more complex.  If you want to make your entire home smarter, it means replacing every ordinary bulb with a smart one, upgrading all the locks, fitting a video doorbell, motorized window blinds and even making the garden more intelligent. It could mean budgeting for a smart home hub or speaker in every room, so that the assistant can hear you no matter where you are.  Add to the list a robotic lawn mower, more security cameras, alarms and sensors – expect to pay £10,000-plus. Throw in a £3,000 smart fridge and a £800 robot vacuum plus other items, and the bill could be a lot higher.

Are smart gadgets expensive gimmicks?     

A truly intelligent product is one that learns about its surroundings, such as how you use it or the layout of your home or garden and then adapts how it works to suit. For example, some wi-fi sprinkler controllers analyse soil, plant types and weather forecasts. It then uses this data to automatically set a watering plan. The idea is it saves water by not watering before it’s about to rain or more than plants need. However, many so-called smart products simply connect to the internet. There are also products that make little sense to be smart at all. A kettle, for example, can switched on via an app on your phone just as you walk in the front door, but it won’t also make you a cup of tea. Teasmade alarm clocks, popular in the 1960s and 1970s, had more functionality as they automatically made tea.

Control and privacy

A smart home, also known as the internet of things, may sound fantastic but there are drawbacks.  For example, the smart video doorbell, a security device against intruders or a way to spy on who is visiting your spouse? The potential for creepiness and control is clear. Whoever controls the tech in the house has the power – and it won’t just be an argument over the TV remote, but lighting, heating, and who gets through the front door. Then there is privacy. Many home gadgets collect data, such as health information, energy usage or even video footage of your family. Few people read through the terms and conditions to discover what is being done with this information.

Brave New World?

Google has already filed patents applications for a smart home with intelligent, multi-sensing, network-connected devices and service robots, that communicate with each other. The patent describes how people could be followed by sensors (cameras and microphones) throughout the house by tracking their “unique signatures” based on gait, patterns of movement, height, voice and facial recognition technology. Lights and music could be switched on or off as they move from room to room. Even when people sleep, devices may capture heart rate, breathing and movement. This information could be used to predict when they are about to wake up and switch on the heating, so the home is warm when they get up. Data can be analysed and aggregated to detect diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, says the patent. It makes scary reading.

The smart home may sound like a dream and clearly it has huge potential, but could it turn into a totalitarian nightmare?

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