Technology as a better building block for the future
September 21 2008 / by TonyManfredi
Category: The Home Year: General Rating: 6 Hot
By replacing valuable natural resources and costly labor with technology we can change the very equation around which the inputs and outputs of our built environments are constructed. The 
justification: we need more for less.
Our environments are poised to become hosts to ever more powerful technologies in the coming years that will seek to cause deep rooted and meaningful change in our everyday quality of life. These technologies will be increasingly pervasive, as they become commonplace in our schools, our offices, and more importantly our homes. Our homes, arguably the most important and widely used of all life’s platforms, are already on the brink of dramatic change. Environmental degradation, a crisis of sustainability in home-ownership, the need for enhanced learning and education, millions of people aging in place, and ever increasing demands on our time are the driving forces that have resulted in these social imperatives:
1. Reduce resource consumption
2. Integrate learning into everyday activity
in the home
3. Allow people to live long and healthy lives in their homes
4. Save time and improve decision making through better access to information.
With this understanding major companies and universities are striving to foster a massive convergence of off the shelf and cutting edge technologies with homes of the future.
1. RFID and contextual search: In the home of the future RFID tags, enhanced high speed networks, complex databases, and contextual search may converge to create homes with near-AI abilities. These technologies will allow the home to utilize specialized search, combined with its database of user preferences and objects within the home, to enhance the lives of the user.
A good example: Changing your lifestyle to healthy living? Your home responds by analyzing the food in your refrigerator and pairing that with an online search of healthy recipes, giving the user information that is both relevant, timely, and serves to to enhance or facilitate immediate goals. Grocery shopping can also become a snap, replacing the ubiquitous shopping list with real time online information regarding the food in your refrigerator.
2. Digital Home Environments: In the home of the future tailored home environments, rendered online by people throughout the world, may give homeowners “ambiance on demand.” Depending on the needs, or whims, of the moment, users could customize their environments for social occasions, exercise, or meditation.
A good example: Interested in experiencing 12th century Japanese architecture? With the touch of a button you could upload a specific ambiance onto your digital wallpaper that changes the entire look and feel of specific rooms, or the entire house. Similar technology could be used to pipe in related music as well. This could be great for making rooms more specific and adaptable to user need. A yoga room could combine specific music and/or instruction with a digital landscape placing the user amidst the landscapes of India, to facilitate and improve the look and feel of exercise.
3. Modular Design: Current homes are built with a mixture of labor and material input that is unsustainable. Eighty percent of the cost of a new home is spent on labor and twenty percent on materials. In the future we will be forced to reverse this ratio by spending much more money on design, materials, engineering, safety, and technology. Our homes will become more exhibitions of our technology and engineering than blood and sweat. By designing and engineering modular home systems and “snap together” parts, we can focus more resources on building better quality environments. In the future it may become possible to create a home that is far less costly and time consuming to build, that at the same time greatly enhances everyday quality of life.
A good example: Modular homes purchased over the internet that can be built to conform to any environment or zoning regulation. Homes that come pre-built with standard technological platforms and automation, could replace $50,000 in labor with $50,000 in technology.
4. On site distribution of health services: By embedding medical systems into the home, and by allowing for the remote monitoring of patients, we can reduce the massive burden on our health system, and improve quality of healthcare when and where it is most critical, in the first moments of need. A mixture of hardware and software could be tuned to create the “virtual doctors visit” and allow for real time decision making and intervention by healthcare professionals using advanced remote monitoring of a patients biometrics.
A good example: Through powerful life-sign monitoring systems, a heart attack is pre-empted when the home senses a dangerous change in heart rhythm and instructs the compromised patient to take necessary precautions. This type of pervasive computing, because of its powerful nature, could also provide people with more appropriate environments for their last days.
Comment Thread (1 Response)
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Saw a good example of hi-tech first response in home on a Stony Brook Medical Center commercial today.
Posted by: Jeff Hilford September 23, 2008
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