The Great Indoors by Emily Anthes

Author:Emily Anthes
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

SEVEN

IF THESE WALLS COULD TALK, LISTEN, AND RECORD

FOR MORE THAN half a century, writers and futurists, from Ray Bradbury to the creators of The Jetsons, have been conjuring up intelligent, high-tech homes that essentially run themselves. In their versions of the future, our homes would be much more than shelter: the houses of tomorrow would cook, clean, and care for us. They’d wake us up, make us breakfast, and then tidy up afterward.

Tomorrow is here. In homes across the world, smart thermostats glow, autonomous vacuums spin, and intelligent speakers stand at attention. Programmable shades rise with the sun, and connected refrigerators monitor our supply of milk. We can rely on smart flowerpots to water the plants, smart pet feeders to dispense kibble to the dog, and smart locks to let the maintenance worker in—all while we’re out of the house. And at the end of a long workday, we can slide dinner into the oven, which will detect that we’re cooking a chicken and then roast it to perfection, and then collapse atop a prewarmed mattress, which will dynamically adjust its temperature and firmness throughout the night. As morning approaches, the mattress will gradually cool to help rouse us out of our slumber.

“This area moves pretty fast now,” said Juan Carlos Augusto, who heads the research group on the development of intelligent environments at Middlesex University in the United Kingdom. “Many things that were thought to be borderline science fiction a few decades ago are starting to hit the market.” Tech companies are investing heavily in smart home systems—also known as intelligent environments, ambient intelligence, home automation, pervasive computing, and the internet of things—and consumer appetite is growing. By 2023, more than half of American households, and one-sixth of those around the world, are expected to have smart home devices.

The first wave of products aimed to alleviate the hassles of daily living, tracking our behaviors and preferences in order to make our homes more comfortable, convenient, and efficient. But now Big Brother is getting an MD. The smart mattresses that keep us comfortable are also collecting reams of data about our sleep quality, heart rate, and respiration, while some smart thermostats are monitoring the air quality in our homes. Many companies now sell smart pill bottles that light up, chime, or fire off text messages when patients miss a scheduled dose. Google has patented an optical sensor that would enable smart mirrors to monitor our cardiovascular health by detecting subtle changes in skin color, and Amazon has patented a system that could prompt our smart speakers to order cough drops when they overhear a sniffle. (It would, presumably, order those lozenges from Amazon.)

These advances, and the ones still to come, mean that our homes are becoming more intimately involved in our health care than ever before. Even as these technologies move into the mainstream, there’s one specific segment of the market that’s ahead of the curve, and it isn’t the one you might expect. It’s not the tech-savvy millennials who are pioneering the most advanced versions of these products—it’s senior citizens.

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