Wiring up for a smart-home future
9 July 2004
When
Kovelan Bangaru wants to draw a bath in his new apartment, he
pulls out his iPaq handheld computer, taps on the screen and the
bath begins to fill itself. Not a bad trick when he's doing it
from the airport, via the internet, so the bath is ready when he
arrives home.
Or when he wants to check that his new $1 million
Mercedes-Benz Maybach car is still parked in the garage under
the apartment block, he pulls out the iPaq, taps on another part
of the screen, and calls up images from the security cameras
watching the car. Again, not a bad trick when he's checking on
the car from, say, Rome.
The Sydney-based property developer, who has just spent
$686,000 adding intelligence to his new $7.5 million apartment
in Seidler's Cove - a ritzy apartment development in Sydney's
historical Rocks district - may well be the nation's most
enthusiastic adopter of smart-home technology, giving those on
more limited budgets a glimpse of where such technology is
heading, but he's by no means alone in his use of technology to
iron out domestic wrinkles.
On a more modest scale, smart-home technology is becoming
increasingly affordable and popular for ordinary home and
apartment owners, so much so that experts expect all new homes
and renovations will have smarts built in within the next few
years.
And with growing and ageing populations colliding with a
rising concern about the environmental impact of urban living,
experts say more and more homes will become intelligent not just
to add gee-whiz new features, but to make them less resource
hungry, too.
And, as we shall see, a new generation of smart homes
designed to allow the elderly to remain in their communities
could introduce a new, some might say disturbing, meaning to the
phrase "motion detection".
"I think within two years if you don't have intelligent
systems in your home, especially in new homes, you're going to
have difficulty either renting them or putting them back on the
market for resale," says Bangaru. He says he has started adding
at least basic intelligence to all of the 300 to 400 homes and
apartments he develops each year.
For his own apartment, Bangaru has opted for the cutting
edge, importing technology from all over the world to create a
living environment that adapts itself to each of its occupants.
When someone arrives at the front door, retinal scanners check
to see if they know who has arrived.
"As soon as my son or my daughter arrive, the system not only
opens the door, it will talk to you and give you a message like
'Clean up your room', or 'Dad's away for the weekend', or
something of that sort," he says.
If the system happens to know the music preferences of the
person who's just walked through the front door, it will
automatically play their music on the hi-fi - a computer which
Bangaru says can store 15,000 CDs or 1000 DVDs, and pipe music
independently to any room in the house. "If I had 200 rooms I
could have 200 different CDs playing at once," he says.
The apartment has more practical features, too. It's
programmed to automatically close all the blinds when the
outside temperature rises above a certain level. Sensors in the
master bedroom detect when someone is getting out of bed at
night, and automatically bring up floor lighting on that
person's side of the bed, leading to the toilet.
Then, of course, there's the revolving dining room which,
like just about every other feature, can be controlled over the
internet, using the handheld iPaq computer with mobile internet
access, or even using a computer in an internet cafe. "I could
make it spin as fast as you want, but you won't keep a glass of
wine on the table," Bangaru says. "It's endless. You can keep
spending money on it, as much as you want."
As it happens, most people don't keep spending endlessly.
"There are the things you can do with smart homes, and then
there are the things that most people want to do," explains
Brendan Rogers, an engineer whose company, Clever Homes, designs
and installs smart-home systems in Melbourne.
"They're not the same thing," he says, noting that most
people spend between $10,000 and $30,000 adding intelligent
systems to their homes, with larger, more sophisticated projects
costing up to $100,000. But while controlling the household over
the internet may sound like a nifty option, most people just
aren't interested.
"It's becoming increasingly easy to interface your home
automation system across the internet, but not all that many
people actually want to do it," he says. "It's not all that
useful. It makes a good story on TV, but if you think about what
you actually want to do with a smart home, the most useful thing
is to integrate the services - the security and the lighting and
the access control - and the internet doesn't add much to that."
What is popular, however, is integrating the security,
lighting, access control and maybe even the air-conditioning
with the phone system. Some smart-home controllers now come with
modules with built-in mobile phone modems, that let householders
control their systems remotely using either text messages or
voice menus. An unexpected visitor could be let into the house
simply by sending a coded text message to the control system,
for instance. Or you could call your home and tell it to turn
the heating on.
But the biggest benefit of having a smart home is in
integrating the existing features with each other, Rogers says.
Allowing the security system to control the lighting, for
instance, means home owners can simulate occupancy when they're
away, deterring burglars. Rather than just turn on an external
spotlight when motion is detected in the backyard, the system
might wait a random number of seconds, switch on a light in a
bedroom visible from the backyard, wait a few more seconds,
switch on another light elsewhere in the house, and then maybe
open a curtain or turn on the TV.
In a series of three seminars it held earlier this year,
looking at the future of residential housing to 2025, the Copper
Development Centre found that such integration of services will
become a key theme of smart housing.
"There's going to be a data plug behind every machine in the
house," says John Fennell, CDC chief executive. "If your fridge
or your dishwasher goes on the blink, the service guy can come
in through the internet, through the virtual tradesman's
entrance, and maintain the machine, the same as they do for
motor cars now.
"The machines will talk among themselves, too. When there's a
heavy demand on the power system, and the city needs to reduce
the load, your air-conditioner will say to your dishwasher,
'I'll turn off because you're halfway through your third
cycle'," Fennell says.
In the long run, the CDC seminars found, the very fabrication
of housing will be inherently computerised: elements such as
walls and roofs will all be built in factories; customers will
go online with their architect or builder to choose components
that will arrive "in a timely fashion" (perhaps the wildest
claim of all) so that the house can simply be put together "with
an allen key, so to speak", Fennell says.
And with governments trying to keep the ageing population at
home, smart homes will play an important social role: they'll
monitor the well-being of residents, checking whether they're
active, watching their heart rate, and maybe even analysing
bowel motions as they pass through the toilet.
If that sounds far fetched, consider this: motion detectors
(the other sort) in Kovelan Bangaru's bathroom already detect
whether a man or a woman is approaching the toilet, and raise or
lower the seat accordingly.
Nuts and bolts of interfacing on
demand
Structured cabling
The basis of a smart house is a structured cabling system, in
which all the electrical, TV, phone and data wiring radiates
from a single cupboard. This makes it simple to interface
systems with each other, and to reconfigure elements: add a
phone line to a room simply by patching the phone system to the
data cable system, which already has outlets in every room.
Lighting control
Lighting control systems like Clipsal's C-Bus are often used
on top of structured wiring as the building block for smart
homes. With programmable switches, movement sensors and dimmers
for intelligent control of lighting, they can also interface
with other systems, such as for entertainment and access
control, to make everything work together. Sometimes it's the
lighting control system that does the interfacing, sending out,
say, infrared signals to a hi-fi, and sometimes other devices,
such as access control devices, have the interfaces built into
them.
Home theatre and multi-room sound
Many smart home installations feature multi-room audio, which
may or may not be integrated with the other systems in the
house. Running speaker cables to each room can be a
cost-effective way to do it, but for purists it can lead to
degraded sound quality. Other systems, such as Linn's multi-room
system, place separate amplifiers in each room, bumping up the
cost but minimising sound quality degradation as you move
further from the main sound system.
Computer integration
Adding a computer to a smart home installation can allow
users to re-program their lighting systems, as well as adding
new entertainment options, such as having large banks of MP3
audio music available on demand. Later this year Microsoft plans
to release a version of its Windows operating system designed
specifically for home entertainment, that will integrate with
Microsoft's Xbox games console so that users can access music
and videos, stored on the PC, from their Xbox.
Reproduced from the
Australian Financial Review, 9 July
2004.
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