The smart home of the future is quickly turning into the present and here are a few devices making this evolution possible.

Xiaomi Mi Vacuum

The Xiaomi Mi Vacuum is a step above your Roomba 980, though it is not as well known! It uses a laser ranging sensor and gyro direction data to create a real-time map and navigate through a house. Popular in China the Xiaomi Mi produces air pressure equivalent to 1,800 Pascals or 37 pounds per square foot creating a suction force capable of doing what vacuums do best. Its main hover brush maintains a tight seal with the floor even on uneven surfaces or in moving from tile or wood to carpet.

Nanoleaf Aurora

Nanoleaf Light Panels are a beautiful smart lighting product designed to automate indoor lighting throughout the day. These triangular panels can mimic a sunrise, help improve your mood with stunning colours and automate your home lighting experience. The product has a Rhythm add-on module that transforms sound into colour creating a new sensory journey.

How do the triangular panels work? They can be mounted on a wall easily using mounting tape and can be pieced together into any desired shape. Using the smartphone app and your voice via Siri, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant, you customize the lighting effects, creating scenes, setting schedules, and even sharing what you have created with a user community.

Ring Video Doorbell

Ring is the developer of a line of video doorbells that let homeowners monitor their property with a Video Doorbell at the front door and Stick Up Cams around the house, creating a ring of security. Its inventor, Jamie Siminoff, credits his wife in helping him come up with the idea.

The built-in sensors send alerts to your smartphone or other mobile devices. also allows two way audio with built-in speakers and microphone. You can also add services that allow you to save and review the video feed and store the images in the cloud. The Ring doorbell comes with motion detection and automatic alerts sent to your smartphone. The camera is high definition, provides a wide-angle 180° view with a range depth of 9 meters (30 feet), and includes infrared LEDs for night vision.

Philips Hue Lighting

Philips, the Dutch electronics company, is attempting to reinvent home lighting with Philips Hue, an ambiance wireless controlled lighting system that comes in a wide variety of shapes, sizes, and models including bulbs, light strips, lamps, and controls. With 16 million hues and colours available, users choose the lighting to match their moods by playing with the colours, synching lights to favourite music, and choosing from hundreds of apps to create totally immersive effects to go along with what you are watching on television, or playing on a video game console. 

You can program the lights to wake you up and even control them from anywhere you are as long as you have access to the Internet. When you aren’t at home you can schedule the lights to turn on and off and do this from anywhere you are on the planet through the smartphone and online interface.

IoT describes the communication among multiple physical devices, embedded in vehicles, buildings and equipment. These devices contain software and sensors that can exchange data over networks. IoT is in many of the tech toys that run our homes and lives. From high-tech thermostats and wireless cameras to voice-activated artificial intelligence, IoT, once a futuristic concept, is now very much a part of our present.

Wireless Technology

Think back to just 10 years ago, right before the first iPhone. Our home technology was contained to a cable box plugged into a wall outlet, a phone plugged into a landline jack, and a home security system wired to a dedicated security network. All of that is almost completely gone in 2017.

For example, take security camera systems. You can still pay a monthly fee for a legacy service to monitor your home, but many opt out of subscriptions for a one-time purchase of a wireless security system. With cameras available from Lorex Technology homeowners can record to a DVR with the images accessible by smartphone or tablet.

Lighting

Lights haven’t changed much in the last 50 years. Our bulb choices may burn longer and use less energy, but we still flick the same manual switches as our parents and grandparents before us. We have dimmer switches for mood lighting but even those are managed manually. And when our day is done we go around turning out the lights.

Today all that can happen automatically. Light systems like Philips Hue are connected to a hub using a Wi-Fi network so that every bulb can be controlled through a smartphone interface. You can dim the lights, change their color, and assign settings all through your phone. And you are not limited to bulbs. Light fixtures, desk lamps, and even LED strips can be connected to the hub and can be controlled by phone. You still have the old switches, but you won’t need to use them unless you can’t find your phone.

Automation

Like the lights and manual switches that controlled them in the last century, many of our other home systems required us to intervene by hand. If you left the house on a cool morning and it turned into a hot day, too bad. Your house when you got home would be roasting.

The Nest and other smart thermostats have changed all that. They learn your daily habits. They track your comings and goings. They are connected through your local Wi-Fi hub to your H/VAC units that provide heating and cooling. When you are out your smart thermostats left on their own can control temperatures in your home. Or if you choose you can use a smartphone app to control your H/VAC remotely. Any way you use them, these automated IoT devices save money by reducing your energy use.

Voice Command

In the last two years, this has become a game changer. Voice command hubs like Amazon Echo,  Google Home, and Apple’s HomePod do everything from playing your favorite music to ordering products, to reminding us of appointments, and keeping us up-to-date on the latest news of interest. And all of this is controlled by your voice.

Voice command interfaces are the stuff of science fiction or so we thought. Our imagination about the voice-controlled home, or a voice-controlled spaceship such as in the series Star Trek, suggested a technology that would be ours sometime in distant future. But no, it’s here now. Through IoT today we are living in that Star Trek future, whether it is using your voice to command your security system, lights, thermostats, or to recall favorite music, the daily calendar, and the latest information and news. All of these Wi-Fi interconnected smart systems are accessible by voice creating lives in our home that can be managed hands-free.