Home automation is a growing industry, as the Internet-of-things becomes more and more prevalent throughout our houses. In short, anything can become “smart”, which basically removes many of the requirements for human input when it comes to regulating temperature, keeping the home tidy, or managing energy usage.
The result is that your home is just how you want it all the time without any ongoing effort on your part.
But, what are the real tangible benefits of this currently quite aspirational technology? Let’s take a look.
Security
Something that’s surprisingly readily available these days is motion sensors. These can be fitted to work with a range of devices, but are most commonly found in CCTV cameras and burglar lights. The latter isn’t particularly science-fiction, but it’s certainly useful and a good place to start.
Then there are more advanced options. How about being able to check your home while on holiday abroad via a live-feed on a smartphone app? What about adding biometric sensors to your front door (think iris scanners and fingerprint sensors), or perhaps in the future face-detection?
The result is that our homes become much safer, and we can rest easy knowing that no-one but us can get into our property.
Entertainment
Getting music to play throughout every room of your house actually isn’t all that difficult and is something that anyone can accomplish for just a few dollars. All you need is a smartphone and a couple of Bluetooth receivers. Plug the receivers into the headphone jack of your speaker systems, and then pair them with your phone. When you play music on your device, that will now stream automatically to those sound systems meaning that you get to listen to the music from proper speakers wherever you go in the house. And, if you take your phone in your pocket the music will follow you from room to room. Pretty cool!
Many other technologies make this similarly straight forward. You can easily stream Spotify to Amazon Fire for instance, or to an Echo.
Similarly, awesome would be being able to project photos, films and images from your computer or tablet straight to your TV. This is something you can once again do fairly easily using a receiver for about $60. Use Windows and get a Mirracas’ receiver that will plug into your HD port on your TV. Now you’ll be able to project your device onto the television to share family photos with guests or just stream movies.
The entertainment options go far beyond this however, and ultimately the bottom line is that it becomes easier to enjoy your favorite media and share it with friends. What’s not to like?
Convenience and Comfort
Again using your smartphone, it’s also possible to control such things as your lights, your electric blinds, your music, your heating and more. This is thanks to wall hubs such as Insteon and others that can be controlled via apps to turn your mains supply on and off as the wall. This way you can touch a single button on your phone (particularly if you are handy at coding) and have your blinds close, lights come on and music start to play. See if that impresses guests!
Other devices such as Nest let you control the temperature in your home through an app, or to set up complex rules and systems. And using a smart-home assistant you can control many of these creature comforts with your voice alone.
You’ll never be too hot or too cold again, and the lighting will always be at the exact right level. What’s more is that you won’t use any more energy than you absolutely need.
In Summary
This is just a few of the current benefits of home automation. It’s only plausible to assume the future holds a whole lot more amazing innovations.
