Smart Home

IoT devices connected to the Internet already are counted in the billions.  FIT through Belkin, Linksys Wemo and Phyn, is a major player in bringing smart technologies into the home.  You may well already have FIT devices that allow you to control your lights, monitor water usage, charge your mobile devices wirelessly and provide you with high quality and reliable Wi-Fi connectivity in your homes.  This is only a start.  The future calls for homes that will be able to sense your needs and make decisions on mundane day-to-day tasks for you, freeing you to focus on tasks that are more important or simply to have more time to relax.  The latter might include making use of sophisticated entertainment centers optimized through smart learning to meet the preferences of you and your family.  

The smart home of the future will incorporate ever more interconnected devices forming intelligent environments that are able to interact with you and meet your needs.  Keeping these secure from computer hacking will be of prime importance.  Determining how best to do this in a cost efficient manner requires research.  The ability to incorporate artificial intelligence in these environments has the potential to transform homes into living environments that know what their residents require or prefer and coordinate devices throughout the house to deliver these.  Perhaps robots will finally fold those clothes and cut those vegetables based on the recipes you have selected.  Perhaps robots will become advanced to the point that they can co-exist with people and become integral part of the home. It might be possible for rooms to be automatically reconfigure themselves from entertainment center to sophisticated business office with furniture reconfiguring themselves accordingly.  Smart home of the future may well be able to monitor the health of their residents as well as the health of the home itself. 

Advances in new materials, flexible electronics, cyber security and AI-controlled dynamically reconfigurable systems are needed to make the smart home of the future become a reality.  Work on collaborative robots for smart factories might translate into user-friendly robots for smart homes. Experiments on understanding the power of distributed sensors networks will lead to new smart life products not yet imagined.  Understand user acceptance and adoption parameters is also of high interest.