Waiting for the smart home

There`s a Sasol ad on at the movies at the moment. It talks about innovation, and suggests how nice it would be to have a milk bottle that changes colour when the milk inside is sour.

This is a fantastic idea. I hate the smell of sour milk, and if there`s even a modicum of uncertainty I will pour the offending liquid down the drain. If I was unsure and used this milk in my tea, my cup would be ruined, regardless of whether the milk was sour or not, because I`d convince myself that it tasted funny.

I don`t know if Sasol is actually working towards creating this handy plastic compound, or if it is only trying to position itself as a truly innovative company, but either way, it`s a good idea.

It works even better than the last concept that I latched on to that would save me from the perils of sour milk, which was a barcode scanner built into a fridge door that let you know when milk, cheese, eggs or even broccoli needed replacing.

These plans all form part of the smart home of the future, where everything is linked, and everything is intelligent.

Georgina Guedes, Editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

These plans all form part of the smart home of the future, where everything is linked, and everything is intelligent. I was discussing this with an architect friend of mine, who has been involved in creating a couple of homes that approach having the level of gadgetry that allows them to think for their owners.

She was saying that she would love to have a way to dial up her house and get it to warm up the oven, so that when she arrived home, all she needed to do was throw in the chicken kebabs, or whatever.

On the other hand, she didn`t like the idea that such a system could run your bath for you. She apparently runs her bath at different temperatures, depending on what she wants to do with it, and having one standard setting would ruin it for her.

I don`t really see the problem here. If I were weird enough to have different temperature baths in the first place, I`d simply set it to the hottest setting and add cold accordingly when I got home.

In another indication of the way in which we might welcome computers into our homes in the future, a robot exhibition opened in Japan this past week. Two of the items on display were a robot security guard, and far more sinister, a robot childminder. The childminder can judge facial expressions and report back to parents with snapshots of their children.

While these are prototypes at this stage, they do raise all sorts of philosophical questions about what constitutes a suitable guardian for children. While I might be happy to let a computer run my bath while I`m on my way home, I`m not sure I`d be happy with some machine, no matter how advanced, taking care of my children.