By Cabe Atwell, contributing writer, EE Times
From pet feeders to window shades to trash cans, it seems that many people are looking for ways to hook everything in their house up to the internet of things. Home-automation solutions exist for nearly every room. It goes beyond the ability to turn a light on and off at a whim; these days, it’s possible to hook up not just your fridge but your cooking utensils to your Wi-Fi and control them while getting updates on dinner right from your smartphone. Some products on the market are an easy purchase to add a little more convenience and simplicity to caring for your home, while some require more monetary investment and time to set up. With a simple push of a button or a voice command, you can automate and simplify the way you care for your house. You may be familiar with some of the biggest products out there, but there’s an entire world of smart home devices that you may not have known existed. If there’s even a small need, there’s probably some smart tech to fill it.
Image: Sleep Number
Sleep-tracking apps on your phone or smartwatch are common enough, so Sleep Number decided to take the data collection right to the source with a bed that logs how well you sleep. Based on how much you stir or snore in your sleep, the bed can adjust firmness, temperature, and support and will send a report to your phone every morning. If insomnia can be cured by collecting data on it, this bed certainly will. There are already myriad other ways to connect your bedroom, from temperature control to shades and lighting, but maybe a bed that tries to auto-adjust to your comfort is the missing piece.
And how can you start your day more easily once you’ve left the bed? A smart toothbrush can tell you just how healthy your brushing habits are. It even makes recommendations for improvement, down to the areas you miss, collecting all this data with a motion sensor, accelerometer, and a gyroscope. If that’s not enough coaching on your brushing technique, a smart hairbrush can report on both your brushing patterns and the health of your hair. To round out the bathroom experience, smart toilet seats will allow you to set preferences for temperature, play music, and automate cleaning the toilet bowl, with some even allowing options to adjust preferences for multiple users.
Image: Kolibree
The kitchen can be set up so you never burn your toast again and can always check on the health of your eating habits. A smart toaster can be controlled to allow you to elevate the bread slightly while it toasts, so there are no burnt surprises to scrape off at the end. A smart fork can monitor how quickly you eat, even vibrating lightly to let you know to slow down. The smart utensil can also track your habits across an entire meal, making a report and offering suggestions much like the toothbrush or hairbrush. Other utensils and dishes, like a smart water bottle, can help monitor your drinking and eating habits and offer helpful suggestions to keep you healthy and hydrated.
Image: Hapi
That’s not the end of the possibilities in the kitchen, however. A smart frying pan equipped with weight and temperature sensors can track every aspect of your cooking. Synced up with an app designed to walk you through a number of recipes, it even provides feedback on whether the pan is too hot or too cold along the way. GE ovens can be controlled from an app, even when you’re away from your house. For nights when wine is on the menu, a smart wine bottle with a touchscreen-enabled sleeve can dispense cartridges filled with wine, like a Keurig, while showing you little tidbits about what you’re drinking. You can easily switch between white and red for the night to meet different preferences, and there’s no worrying about the bottle going stale. And after-dinner cleanup is easier with a smart trash can that opens with voice or motion control or one that can even scan bar codes to put used items back on the grocery list.
Image: SmartyPans
While these automation products are on the market and ready to go, there are many areas of the kitchen ready for new developments or improvements on existing tech. One such device that could use a rework to its sensors is a smart egg tray that keeps track of both inventory and whether your eggs are still good. The current product out on the market, by all accounts, may not be the most functional, but developments like this can only lead to more innovation in how we can stock and monitor our kitchens.
Image: Bless This Stuff
Laundry can undoubtedly be made more efficient as well. While there are not too many products currently on the market for homes, the SmartDry sensor works with Alexa to provide dryer status alerts to your phone — wherever you are — and even monitors whether the clothes are finished drying before the cycle ends or if they’re getting too hot. The sensor can be placed in any home dryer and is fairly easy to set up so you can start monitoring your laundry without even getting up to check it.
Beyond products that you can purchase and set up yourself, home-automation experts field requests ranging from more regular lighting and temperature control to mailboxes that send a “you’ve got mail” notification and automatic lighting to help homeowners avoid operating electronics during Shabbat. Technicians innovate to fulfill what requests they can because, after all, home automation is about personalization as much as it is about convenience and control.
Image: SmartDry
This article was originally published on EE Times .
Advertisement
Learn more about Electronic Products Magazine
