Thanks to technology, home interiors have become a lot more advanced in recent years. Today, smart homes are becoming the standard for interior design. Adding both style and convenience into the home, there are lots of great smart home products you can invest in.
Here, you’ll discover what a smart home is, the products it includes and the future of smart home technology.
What is a smart home?
A smart home basically utilises the latest technology to make daily living as convenient and efficient as possible. Everything is connected and typically controlled via smartphone apps, tablet or even via your voice.
You can have just a few smart features in the home, or you could make the entire home fully connected so they can communicate with each other and with you. It all depends upon your preferences and your budget. It consists of devices to enhance and control things such as the lighting, audio, security and temperature of the home.
What does it include?
The most popular smart home devices include:
- Security systems – smart lock, smart doorbells
- Smart Thermostats
- Smart Lighting
- WIFI smart window blinds and shades
- Smart Kitchen appliances –fridge, washing machine, microwave etc
Smart security systems
Smart security systems are a great investment as they come with advanced security features. Smart locks, for example, are an electromechanical lock designed to perform locking and unlocking operations when authorised instructions received using a wireless protocol and cryptographic key. It can also send alerts for the different events it monitors. Smart locks are ideal if you’re someone who often forgets they’re keys, as the key is not a physical instead, a smartphone or other wireless device is used to grant access. Smart locks can be used alongside smart doorbells to allow the user to see who and when someone is at their door. Other smart security systems include smart home surveillance cameras and smoke detectors.
Smart thermostats and Smart lightening
Smart thermostats can be used to accurately control the temperature of the home remotely via a mobile or internet connected device. This smart feature allows the capability of greater control of heating and cooling, which can also help you to save money on your energy bills. Then there’s smart lighting, which also is controlled via an app, allowing you to change the brightness of the bulbs. You can make adjustments based on the situation you’re in, for example, having a different light setting for watching a film, another for reading and one for dinnertime etc. Like smart thermostats, smart lighting is also ideal for energy efficiency.
Smart Hub Blinds
Smart Hub blinds such as these (Must be electronic blinds) Are compatible with a smart hub that is operated with a touch of a button via your smartphone or tablet. Blinds can be individually controlled, by room or all together.
You can also use voice app technology such as Alexa and Google home to open and close your blinds using just your voice.
Smart Kitchen appliances
More recent smart technology appliances that are set to be more developed are smart home kitchen appliances such as smart fridges. A smart fridge is programmed to sense what types of products are being stored within and keep track of the stock, letting you know whenever a food item needs to be replenished. You can also get inbuilt cameras to check if your short of anything whilst out shopping. With an app, you can also adjust the temperature and get alerts to your phone if the door has been left open. Another is a smart washing machine and dryer. These machines give you more control over your wash cycles than just hot, cold etc. You can remotely start wash cycles from anywhere using your smartphone or schedule them. And now even search and downloads brand new wash cycles for certain types of fabrics. Some smart appliances have inbuilt diagnostic sensors that will alert you if repair or maintenance work is required. Other smart kitchen appliances are smart kettles, smart oven, microwave etc.
Future developments
There are a lot of developments being worked on in the smart home sector. Smart appliances are continuously being improved and more convenient.
Other things to watch out for include smart toilets, voice assisted AI gadgets and even enhanced home robots.
Smart homes do make our daily lives much more convenient. While the technology we can currently invest in is impressive, further work is being done to create even smarter devices. Eventually, the goal is to make our entire homes fully connected.
