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Not Your
Parents' Kitchen
Imagine your house waking up. Now imagine it helping you wake up. Your alarm clock tells the electric blanket to switch off and the coffee machine to start percolating. You tumble out of the cooling bed and follow the aroma to the kitchen, where a quick glance at your refrigerator's touch-screen reminds you of the dinner party you planned for tonight. You ask the refrigerator to suggest a recipe based on its current contents.
Since tuna fish salad isn't what you had in mind, you use the refrigerator's digital touch-screen to connect to an online gourmet recipe Web site. You choose chicken fricassee with black-eyed peas, and tell your refrigerator to order the ingredients from an online grocery story, to be delivered later that day. When you return home, you tell the counter-top monitor in your kitchen to call up a Julia Child recording on the Internet, and she proceeds to give you a step-by-step demonstration of how to make chicken fricassee. And if you get distracted and forget what ingredients you've added, there's no need to fret — your counter-top monitor, the same one projecting Julia Child, has recorded your every move. You put Julia on hold while you replay the last three minutes of your own gourmet chef act. When your guests arrive later that evening, exclamations abound over your expertly prepared chicken fricassee. Welcome to the home of the future. The Demise of the Refrigerator Magnet? Manufacturers around the world have recently unveiled smart appliances that talk to each other and to the Internet. For instance, the TimeHelper Alarm Clock, from Sunbeam Corp. subsidiary Thalia Products Inc., will communicate with other appliances, letting them know when to start making coffee or turning off your electric blanket. When you hit the snooze button in the morning, the TimeHelper can signal the HLT-Smart Coffeemaker to start brewing your coffee or tell the lamps to turn on because you will be heading downstairs in a few minutes. “The Thalia TimeHelper clock is there for little things, such as automatically resetting all of your HLT-Smart clocks after a power failure,” John Hamann, president and CEO of Thalia. “And it's there for the big things too, like saving precious seconds in an emergency and giving you more information right away, when you need it most.” Sunbeam created Thalia Products just to develop smart appliances. Thalia, which stands for Thinking and Linking Intelligent Appliances, plans to start mass producing the gadgets by late 2000. Thalia connects appliances through its Home Linking Technology. HLT uses either electrical wiring in the home or a small radio transmitter to let products talk to each other. Because every Thalia appliance has HLT circuitry embedded in its inner workings, the appliances just need to be plugged into a wall outlet and they can start communicating. Battery-powered HLT appliances, such as smoke detectors, use 900 MHz radio signals to talk to each other. To ensure that your appliances don't talk to your neighbors' or vice versa, the HLT system uses product codes, different radio frequency channels, and encryption techniques. Thalia has also created the HomeHelper Kitchen Console, the HLT-Smart Coffeemaker and the HLT-Smart Stand Mixer. The HomeHelper kitchen console allows people to communicate with and control all HLT-Smart appliances in the home from the kitchen. Users can connect to the Internet with the console's built-in 56K modem, and it has additional memory to store specific information such as recipes, schedules, appointments and calendars. For the chef who lacks a measuring cup, the HLT-Smart Stand Mixer has a built-in measuring device. When used in a home with the kitchen console, it will automatically measure any ingredient poured into its bowl. If you need to change the servings in a recipe, the HomeHelper console will do the math with just the touch of a button. The Electrolux Group, another appliance manufacturer, is developing the Screenfridge, a refrigerator with a touch-screen embedded in its door. This fridge will offer you e-mail access and keep a list of its contents. If you run low on milk, the refrigerator will automatically e-mail the grocery store. This model is, for the moment, only a prototype, and a date has not yet been set for production. Another new refrigerator will help people avoid leaving the refrigerator door open. The Sub-Zero Integrated 700 series refrigerator beeps after the door has been open for more than 15 seconds. It also has advanced microprocessors that set three temperature zones. New microwaves
may put an end to estimating cooking times for foods. Silent
Radios At the Berkeley Wireless Research Center, a research consortium at the University of California, Berkeley, researchers are developing radios that would allow appliances in the home to communicate with one another without wires. The “picoradio” is a very small, ultra-low-power radio that could be embedded in sensors in hundreds of appliances, such as computers, lights or security systems. Each radio would be as small as a postage stamp and could run for years off of its miniature batteries. Picoradios would report to a few central points in a home, and the system would process all the information coming from the house or appliances.
This picoradio system could replace much of the wiring in houses and businesses with radio connections, a technology that is cheaper to install. According to researchers, the potential for picoradio technology is immense. Using picoradios, much more sophisticated entertainment, heating and lighting systems could be developed. Even toys might be built with picoradios, making them adaptive and interactive. In a house equipped with a picoradio system, a family could flip a few switches when leaving or arriving home. The radios would communicate among themselves to determine what needs to be done - activating the security system, turning lights on or off and adjusting the temperature. It's
Time to Have a Talk with your ... House? This house, called the "aware home," is replete with video, audio, motion and weight sensors to track where people are and what they are doing. Eventually, the Georgia Tech researchers hope, the house will be able to recognize people, attach identities to them and respond to each as an individual. One result might be an “aware intercom system.” “Let's say I ask (the house) to talk to grandma (who is in another room). It might make the connection or it might come back and say, 'Well, she's lying down right now — are you sure you want to bother her?'” said Cory Kidd, lab manager at the house. If you're the forgetful type, researchers at the laboratory are studying ways to have the aware home alert residents of the location of specially tagged items, like keys. Add That
House to My Shopping Basket The MIT researchers hope to revolutionize the design and construction of houses with an online program that lets people custom design their dream houses. Architectural rules — such as the kitchen needs to be near the dining room — would be inputted into the program and it then would ask questions of the consumer. Each answer would tell the program what kind of home the consumer was looking for. All the data would then be sent to the fabricator of the components of the house. “So then these fully finished components ... arrive on the site and they are very rapidly snapped together,” said Kent Larson, director of the House_n project. “These are components that are not made out of standardized elements because people don't like standardization in their homes; they like them to be different. These are unique because technology now allows for unique components to be combined cheaply,” said Larson. Consumers already follow this process — creating individualized products based on a selection of interchangeable components — when they buy computers. The process is called mass customization. “One can imagine, in the future, brands of houses ... so you have a BMW house or a Martha Stewart house or a Kmart house,” said Mark Tapia, a research scientist working on the House_n project.
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