We have been teased with a concept of a smart home or connected home for many years now. This year’s edition of CES revealed that a connected home is more of a reality than ever before. Qualcomm has revealed its smart home and showed just how technology is able to impact the way we live our lives. However, this year, the focus was on things people can buy separately; install them in their homes and how we can make use of them in our day to day lives.
Home can be much more when it is connected. Kids spend time on tablets, the adults spend their time on computers while everyone uses a smartphone. Our activities revolve around playing games, surfing the Web, watching movies and listening to music. There are five or more devices that are connected in our homes these days but in the future that number could rise to 50 or even more than that. Qualcomm asks what’s the use of so many smart devices when there is not a smart network capable of bringing together all of them.
Qualcomm networking claims to be able to make your home more digital, smarter and a lot more connected. From Ethernet, Wi-Fi and Powerline that are able of handling media traffic, to hybrid networks and small cells that are able of maximizing flexibility and performance, Qualcomm’s connected home is supposed to redefine how and where we live so we can enjoy a better lifestyle.
Image source: geek.com
Qualcomm Connected House is proof that the future is now. The front door “speaks” to the smoke alarms inside the house and lights flash when you leave the fridge door open. Everything inside the house can be controlled remotely with a smartphone and is linked together.
Some interesting features include a smart lock that unlocks the door when someone who lives in the house is near it. Smart TVs inside the house warn parents when their children are surfing the internet when they are supposed to be sleeping and a system allows the users to set all the clocks inside the house with just one touch of a button.
All the products Qualcomm uses in its house can also be bought separately and are developed by Qualcomm and other companies. All of these devices run the AllJoyn Software which is an open source project initiated in 2011 by Qualcomm. It lets devices using the software to communicate between each other. Qualcomm partnered with numerous other companies to create more smart devices for the house and to develop the software even further.
Events are triggered when the user performs actions within the house. For example, if a person opens the door on the fridge an event will be triggered and lights will flash or a sound will be heard.
Image source: slashgear.com
In the front door of the house the August smart lock can be found. The lock works by sensing the August app on the home owner’s tablet or smartphone. In order for the lock to be opened, a person with a code must approach the door with Bluetooth enabled on their tablet or smartphone and access the address from the August app. The lock verifies the identity of the user via Bluetooth and allows him or her access inside the house. Red lights on the front panel of the smart lock will turn green and the device will open the door by unlocking it. In order of having access to another person’s home, the home owner must send you an invitation via Facebook or using the address book.
CES 2015 proved that we’re all already living inside the connected dream. Numerous new products presented at CES 2015 were improvements on previous ones. One of our favorite things from CES 2015 regarding a connected home was Parrot Pot. Parrot Pot uses the concept of the Flower Power sensor and improved it by developing a flower pot that is able of keeping someone’s plants alive without them having to worry about when and how much to water them.
Another interesting device was the Misfit Bolt. There is nothing new about smart light bulbs but Misfit Bolt significantly lowered how much the these kinds of products cost and made it a lot easier for everyone to install such things into their own home. D-Link and Honeywell had their share of the spotlight and many other companies besides them presented a series of sensors, hubs and cameras that are able to make our homes smarter.
Smart homes have been dreamed about for years now and they have even been present in entertainment from anywhere between the McFly home in Back to the Future to one of the Halloween specials in The Simpsons. Qualcomm and other companies seem to bring the dream closer to reality and we can’t wait to see if the future will find us living in such homes or at least using some of these devices separately.
