Wouldn’t it be cool if our house could tell us when our food is cooked, if our taps our leaking and how much power we are using?
How about having the heating turned on ready for you getting home or if your house could ‘sense’ you coming and display a welcome message?
Welcome to Master Inventor at IBM, 43 year old Andy Stanford-Clark’s world. He has turned his home into a house that twitters.
Andy fitted hundreds of sensors to objects in his home on the Isle of Wight enabling the house to automatically send tweets via Twitter, the micro-blogging social networking site to alert him to what’s happening.
“It’s a bit of a showcase for the technology,” he said.
“Monitoring things such as how much power our house is using can give us valuable insights into the cost of various appliances in the home.
“Recently I was out and got a tweet saying water usage was higher than normal. I phoned home and my wife looked out of the window to see the garden hose had been left on.
“This can help us take steps to reduce our carbon footprint and reduce energy bills. Mine has dropped by a third in the last year” he said at the British Science Festival.
“These systems are also relatively inexpensive to set up — a basic set-up would cost around £150.”
Ok so it won’t break the bank but if we wanted this in our own home how easy would it be to set it up?
“It was a real challenge but was relatively simple using technology easily available — the chips used in Oyster cards, for example,” said Dr Stanford-Clark.
Dr Stanford-Clark can control everything via a mobile phone so it’s possible for him to switch on and off appliances when he is not even at home.
“It’s very convenient at times,” he said. “If I’m on the way home I can turn on the heating.”
The information obtained from the sensors is automatically sent to a Linux server which then makes intelligent decisions based on that information in order to manage the various devices in the home.
The scope is endless but most of the technology Dr Stanford-Clark has implemented is aimed at reducing power consumption and it’s just the beginning he said.
A house that squawks, now that’s cool!
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