Smart homes – who doesn’t want to make their life simpler?

Smart technology is also likely to make your wallet smart. It will give you more stress looking after it, more worry monitoring what’s going on, and take up too much of your time when you should be working. It’s bad enough now when people have phones glued to their ears.

And smart energy meters – only good enough to send readings at a cost of £11 billion. Don’t we have anything better to do with our money?

As a grumpy Luddite (I like steam engines, gardening and woodwork) the simple life to me is one where you don’t over complicate it, and don’t let yourself be controlled by technology. 🙁

Given that you would have to spend quite a lot of money on various adaptations to your home and its fittings and systems to make much use of the smart home app I think it will take some time before it makes much impact on our lives. I can imagine the chit-chat in the office as people show off the remote functionality they have at their fingertips and compete to have the most cameras, remote controlled kettles, sensors and programmable lighting. As Ellie suggests, telling me a window has been left open is only half the story; I want a gadget that closes and locks it for me,

Why do these great leaps into the future always seem to end up with such banal applications, like putting the kettle on? Will it check there’s enough water in it? No; for that you need Cortana in Windows 10 to give you a reminder to fill the kettle before you leave home [ the sweet-talking girl having checked your diary to see that you’ll be bringing a colleague home from work for tea and will need more water in the kettle than usual and then checking how the trains are running to programme the kettle for your estimated arrival time and told you to pick up some milk on the way back from the station because it had a peek inside your fridge and found there was none within its use-by date]. Talk about making an easy life difficult.

One advantage of age is that you have been through several iterations of must have technologies – and pretty much all of them were over-hyped and early adopters got stung for the novelty price. Some technologies of course died a death quickly and some lingered on for years.

Is this anything better. I doubt it.

Of course if you can monitor what is going on so can other people and they may not be friendly. There is a tale, possibly apocryphal, of a divorced husband using his knowledge of the former matrimonial home’s high tech gadgetry to put on the heating full blast when his ex-wife left on her fortnight honeymoon.

So it looks to me like a hackers delight which will be adopted rapidly by people with more money than sense … of security.

I have never been an early adopter of technology, preferring others to discover whether new products are useful and waiting for teething problems to be resolved.

Sometimes I have waited too long. I regret that I did not buy a sat nav sooner than I did.

A friend used to make mock of smartphone users but he is now a convert, thanks to an app that his wife uses to monitor atrial fibrillation. Their son is a consultant cardiologist and keeps an eye on his mum.

Often technology arrives before a purpose is identified but I don’t see a problem with this.

People need to realize that all computer based systems can be hacked . Beware. !!

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Home automation has a lure which is curious. It’s not cheap, yet it’s a sort of magic and who doesn’t like that? Well, men certainly do but not so women. This is one of those areas where there exists a pronounced gender divide. Whether this is down to how we educate our young, or how we socialise them, no one’s quite sure, yet.

Like Kenneth, our house has a degree of home automation, but having investigated the costs, security implications, standards and compatibility I’m not committing at this point. Apple is expected to integrate an entire tranche of standards into a spec. shortly, that will allow devices from several different companies to be controlled by and through the Apple TV, and it’ll be interesting to see what comes out of that. But for now, I’m happy with the degree of automation I have, controlled through an iPad (Home cinema, electric blankets, central heating) and I’ll be waiting to see if the promised ‘magic wand’ really materialises.

In a commercial building the problem lies in the number of people occupying a space. The benefit of automated systems is in relieving individuals of thinking about how best to control the environment. It is done for them.
At home I confess that I don’t find any difficulty in manually controlling my lights (although we do have a remote controller for some sockets with table lamps attached – saves getting out of your chair to switch them on and off). Nor do we have any problem drawing blinds, curtains, switching off the TV, controlling the washing machine……etc. I’ve looked at the HA publicity and am impressed, but not sufficiently impressed to invest substantial sums in the equipment needed, nor rely upon it totally; when a device fails, can it be over-ridden?) The general problem with such systems is establishing a common protocol for device control so you can use hardware from different manufacturers controlled by common software – you don’t get locked in to one supplier. This has happened in the commercial world as it is essential to maintain independence from reliance on a single supplier.

But lots of people like gadgets; they can be fun as well as useful. Why not? Perhaps when I am old and infirm being able to do everything from an armchair will have more appeal.