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The Invisible Smart Home

The home technology of the future will shape our living spaces quietly behind the scenes.

In Spike Jonze's film Her (2013), the protagonist, Theodore, lives alone in a high-rise apartment with a stunning utopian view of the Los Angeles skyline in the future. In search of a cure for loneliness, Theodore acquires Samantha, a highly advanced virtual assistant with a female voice. Theodore eventually falls in love with Samatha as he comes to rely on her for both practical and emotional needs.

Her is fundamentally a lyrical meditation on loneliness and our reliance on digital tools. At the time of the film, IoT (Internet of Things) technology was also on the verge of exploding. Wired magazine quickly noted that Her “captured the public imagination with its vision of a lightning-fast evolutionary trajectory of virtual assistants and the emotional bonds we could form with them.”

What adds to the realism of the scenario is that, even in this future world of advanced technology, Theodore's home looks exactly like any other luxury high-rise city apartment familiar to us today. There is nothing wildly futuristic about the space. The technology is invisible.

Eight years after the release of Her, the future of IoT for smart homes in 2022 looks like this: ambient AI sensors that do not require audio or video data, hands-free health monitors, connected-everything in the home, and an always-present “metaverse”, a virtual reality environment where social interactions take place via personal avatars.

The future of homes, like the smart but otherwise familiar apartment in Her, will be mostly invisible.

These new technologies will work quietly in the background, connected by a massive network of data collected and transmitted continuously between objects, devices and living things.

Although embedded Smart Home technology is already on its way to becoming ubiquitous in every household, the future of Smart Homes is expansive. How will intelligent computing continue to shape our living spaces? These big ideas in Smart Home technology help us imagine what that future might look like.

Telewellness is a subset of telehealth or digitised healthcare services that improves healthcare delivery. Telewellness goes beyond medicine and traditional healthcare to support our overall wellness. From the comfort of our own homes, we could be sending dental health data to our dentists via smart toothbrushes, having our health automatically monitored daily via smart mirrors, and anonymizing our health data via blockchain technology.

AI Voice Assistants are no longer a novelty in homes, but the advanced AI assistant of the future will go above and beyond to intuitively take care of our daily needs. This could take the form of fully customisable voice assistants and all-day wearable AI that is constantly listening. AI chatbots are even being developed to help people with dementia and their caregivers with communication tools and cognitive rehabilitation.

Next-Gen Home Delivery technologies are rapidly evolving as e-commerce companies try to keep up with the explosion of online shopping behaviour. In the future, highly secure and efficient home delivery could look like seamless package drop-off integrated into apartment buildings, theft-free security systems, delivery robots and drones, and enhanced tracking of the last-mile delivery status.

Intelligent Self-Cleaning Homes might still be a pipe dream for the time being, but devices like super-smart robotic vacuum cleaners, automatic laundry folders, and sustainable water-and-air monitors and filtration systems are already being developed to pave the way. This research provides us with a comprehensive picture of what a self-sustaining home might entail.

IN REAL-TIME: GuocoLand has implemented more than 20 of its own digital initiatives over the last two years to improve the productivity, efficiency, and safety of its developments. Among these trials with local partnerships are Neo and Triooo commercial cleaning robots, uHoo indoor air health and quality sensors, Operva AI façade inspection, SpaceAGE Labs IoT sensors, and Groupup.ai, which helps monitor the well-being of the elderly.

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