Digital home technologies and transformation of households

Abstract

The basic issue I examine here is whether and how contemporary home life is being transformed with the arrival of new digital technologies. As new technologies diffuse into the home, new terminology has begun to emerge as, for example, in smart homes, home automation, digital home, digital living, networked home, home of the future, smart appliances and so on. To simplify the terminology, in this paper, I will use the term “digital home technologies” and smart home technologies interchangeably to describe all of them. Although digital home technologies have developed in different directions because of the types of industry players involved, some common themes underlie these developments. They all seem to point to a great sense of anticipation that home life as we have understood in the past two or three decades will undergo some fundamental changes. It is claimed that some of the changes may be the result of advances at the technological frontier. It is generally acknowledged that the digital home idea has been around for at least a decade and people had known about its potential possibility even in the mid-1980s from the prototypes built in the USA, UK and Scandinavia. Embedded in the concept of digital home are smart appliances, multimedia systems, energy devices, sensors, lighting systems, sensors and control systems, and home robots which manifest basic qualities of programmable machine intelligence. However, their implementation has not been very successful and has been a little slow. Recent developments seem to suggest that digital home concepts are closer to reality and must be taken seriously. To put these developments in a historical perspective, one can trace all such advances to the early 1980s with the introduction of the PC into the home. This was also the period when various electronic gadgets entered the domestic space: VCRs, microwave ovens, answering machines, cable TV to name important few. A lot has happened since then. For example, the technological scene changed dramatically with the arrival of the Internet connecting the household to the external environment in some fundamental ways. The introduction of mobile phones and wireless technologies has further opened up the technological boundaries. The possibilities seem endless. In this ever increasing technological frenzy, some caution must be exercised as new technologies knock on the door to gain acceptance by families. Our previous studies show that families are reluctant to “overtechnologize” their homes, but at the same time are quite open to technologies that fit with their current patterns of behaviors and possibly add value to the family life. It is this balance between too much and too little technology that one must seek and it is also what motivates our thinking in this area.