Ministry of Innovation / Business of Technology

The five technologies that will transform homes of the future

Novel technologies available today will evolve into necessities tomorrow. Here …

Sadly, the home of the future will not include a flying car. But it will sit on a pole.
Image courtesy of Hanna-Barbera

You get home from work on a Tuesday evening. Sensing your arrival, your home turns on the lights in the living room and kitchen. You stop by the bathroom and step on your Internet-connected scale—it absorbs your day's activity levels from a clip-on fitness monitoring device, then logs them on a website along with your sleeping activity and health history.

After making dinner, you sit down in front of the TV and tell it you want to buy a series you heard about on the way home from work. It responds to your voice, and in a few seconds downloads the entire first season over a gigabit connection. The series automatically downloads to your tablet, too, so you'll have it available on the go tomorrow.

We've been sold on such technological visions for years, but they always seem to be "three to five years" out. The tech we do get never seems to work quite as seamlessly as the futurists suggest. And yet we're still making remarkable technical progress; networking in general, and the Internet in particular, have only begun to transform our homes. Here are five basic technologies that will soon prove crucial to our networked lives—and none are mere fantasies. The core technologies exist; shipping products exist. They just need to make it into more homes before the effects are truly felt.

Super high-speed Internet

A lucky few communities have already managed to line up gigabit home Internet connections: Google's projects in Kansas City, Missouri and Kansas City, Kansas, EPB's network in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and's plans for San Francisco. 

Sonic in Sebastopol
Sonic in Sebastopol

Gigabit fiber connections remain the technological equivalent of Evil Knievel stunt-jumping a row of buses. Such speeds are more entertaining than practical for most, but content on the Internet will only continue to grow in size and quality. The Internet connection provides the baseline bandwidth that makes all of home network uses possible.

But getting gigabit Internet into the house does little good if you can't share it. To that end, groups like the Wireless Gigabit Alliance are already at work transitioning gigabit connections to WiFi. By focusing a concentrated signal from router to connected device, or "beamforming," the IEEE 802.11ad WiGig specification will allow data transmission speeds of up to 7Gbps. Qualcomm plans to start making 802.11ac chips soon that will give mobile and desktop devices access to 1.3Gbps WiFi speeds.

Faster WiFi can't come soon enough: a lot of our personal Internet business is currently conducted through smartphones (thus 3G and 4G connections). Carriers are straining under the load, capping data and throttling "unlimited" connections. We can expect more carriers producing devices with technology that makes offloading to WiFi as seamless as possible.

Another new standard, 802.11u, streamlines the process of switching between 3G and WiFi. Instead of presenting users with a long list of inscrutable SSIDs, 802.11u lets devices see and automatically connect to active WiFi, thus offloading activity from the cellular data connection. Of course, this requires public, trustworthy WiFi, like the one managed by the city of Chattanooga. They're rare today, but will likely become a necessary supplement to the cellular networks struggling to keep up.

Smart thermostats and the future of power

There's a lack of transparency in the power usage of most homes. Power comes in, it gets used, and you get a bill. The "how" and "how much" of what happens in between are difficult to determine. But a range of technologies and devices are setting themselves up to make the whole life-cycle of energy more visible and easier to control.

For example, the Nest Learning Thermostat received a lot of buzz last fall for its ability to adapt automatically to users' habits and temperature preferences. Leave the house at 8AM everyday? The Nest detects your routine and learns to stop heating or cooling the house unnecessarily. Come home for an impromptu lunch, nap, or Skyrim session? The Nest detects that too, and starts warming or cooling the house to your ideal temperature.

The Nest will automatically sense you're out of the house and turn down the temperature

Not only does the thermostat require little manual adjustment and learn your habits, it's also networked. It can communicate with other Nest thermostats in the house and lets you adjust the temperature via an app or Web interface.

The goal of the Nest, aside from keeping your temperatures exactly where you want them, is to save power. The Nest tracks users' energy use over time and displays it in the aforementioned interfaces. The device is expensive ($249), but we see a future for it alongside the push for smart grids.

Smart grids, along with smart meters installed in the home and appliances that can report their energy use, allow residents and utility companies to get an overview of how power is being used. Like the Nest, a smart meter (or its integrated application) aims to help customers use power more efficiently through tools like real-time variable pricing. You may leave your PC on all day when you're at work, even though electricity costs the most then, because you value a quick midnight gaming session over power savings. But when an app shows you this habit costs you $20 every month, you might be more inclined to turn the computer off and sit through an OS start up.

Remember Hohm? Whatever happened to that?
Remember Hohm? Whatever happened to that?

Smart grids were big news around 2009, with Google and Microsoft looking to get in on the action, but the field has seen little activity since. Home automation systems do exist right now, but they aren't able to learn your household's activity and start at around $1 million to install.

The marriage of Nest-like technologies and smart grids could be a beautiful thing: a device that not only turns off the heat, but lights, monitors, and coffee makers. It may even address old and dangerous toaster ovens when it detects you've left the house or turn on a couple of indoor or outdoor lights when it gets dark so you can see your way when coming back.

Centralized entertainment and the streaming revolution

Cable TV is a problem waiting to be solved. Have any companies ever slouched more slowly toward progress than pay-TV operations? Sluggish set-top boxes, unwieldy remotes, and disorganized channel systems are the norm.

Fortunately, the Internet provides options. Video streaming is undoubtedly the future of subscription content, though there's no definite leader in terms of bringing that content into your living room. Plenty of devices are picking up the slack left by cable companies: the Roku and Boxee boxes offer a way to handle content from Netflix, Hulu, and YouTube on your TV. Gaming consoles like the Xbox 360 offer that integration as well. At a pinch, plugging an HDMI cable into a laptop works, too.


In the home of the future, scheduled programming has a dim future compared to on-demand. It won't vanish, but its viewer returns will continue to pale in comparison to what people choose to watch in their own time. This is particularly true with more devices like the Promise Home from Promise.TV, which can record every program on every TV channel and store it for a week.

TV hardware is due for a revamp, too. Entertainment setups haven't gone without attempts at progress, like CableCard and GoogleTV, but in the near future, TVs will gain what tablets already have: connectivity, storage, and display all in one.

Of course, that leaves the problem of control. The tablet's usual touch approach won't fly here. No one wants to stand at an arm's length from a 50-inch television swiping between programs, nor do they want to continue navigating between selections with directional arrows and numbers on a rubbery IR remote control. Mice and keyboards were never going to work for the living room. They've proved too wobbly in the lap and the buttons are too irresistible for stray pillows and couch cushions.

Tablet-style remotes to accompany fancier TVs aren't new, but they'll become more ubiquitous, along with more apps that let people use a smartphone or tablet they already own to control the TV. But voice and gesture controls have a lot more potential for use here. Devices that interpret them (like Microsoft's Kinect) are likewise prime for integration into a display, so long as the recognition technology keeps improving.

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