Connected Living: Smart home of the future debuts at CeBIT

One of the highlights of this year’s CeBIT, the digital industry’s largest annual international event, is an intelligent, networked house. The Smart Home would be able to find the cheapest electricity, warn of potential problems and use applications to combine and simplify everyday tasks.

House, Photo: Public domain image by wiki user Eye

It may seem like a Star Trek idea, but the home’s intelligent technology for living would use computers to close doors by themselves, turn lights on and off when the last person leaves a room and switch heating to energy-saving mode.  And that’s just to start.

The futuristic Smart Home will debut to digital industry experts and the general public over some 200 square meters March 1-5 at the CeBIT trade fair. The home will offer features designed to meet particular needs of singles, families and seniors.  

The exhibit is part of a collaboration with the innovation center Connected Living – an association whose goal is to develop and organize eligible projects for new, cross-industry solutions for digital homes. Some 35 companies and organizations are part of Connected Living, among them the Fraunhofer research organization.

Easing everday tasks while saving energy

One of the innovations on display includes a Home Service Plattform, a kind of control center from which various services and systems are controlled for home networking, among them household appliances, entertainment systems, heating, lighting and monitoring systems for burglary, fire or water damage.

Of special interest, is that the new home would enable household devices to communicate in real time over a so-called Home Service Box, an integrated add-on application (App) for energy management, which would also show a device’s energy consumption. The system would be able to communicate real-time messages with its user and turn on a household device.

Additional clever home options to feature at CeBIT include programs for digital identification at the door, light control in individual rooms and the connection of Internet TV with mobile devices like iPads. Connected Living options will include such clever ideas as a personal trainer connected to a home exercise machine that coordinates with Internet TV or a personal chef in the kitchen. Of interest to senior citizens or the disabled, the Home Service Plattform would also be able to communicate medical data in case of emergency.

Best of all, the Home Service Plattform will not be tied to any particular equipment manufacturer, but rather it is to work on an open standard that can be networked with devices from different manufacturers. The Home Service Box is to make its way into stores within the next two years and is set to cost around 400 Euros.

Fraunhofer CeBIT Blog

Connected Living