#227 – Human-centric Home Technology: Smart Living and Digital Comfort

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, people have spent far more time at home than ever before. This has increased the need for home technology that improves living comfort and wellbeing. There is also a growing emphasis on combating climate change and a demand for greener, more sustainable homes. This has led to the rise of wellness real estate and smart home certifications, and home technologies are helping to accelerate this trend.

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In this report, Webrain spotlights seven different aspects of human-centric home technology. The first is presence, in which technology is applied to enhance human connection, whether through remote linkage with loved ones or co-living arrangements with others when friends and family may be distant or gone. The second is comfort, in which technology is used to address the environmental factors that enrich home life: climate, lighting, air quality, and noise reduction. The third is health. Here technological advances are coming to bear on automated ways to ensure and monitor health and wellness, with a special look at how the elderly will be served. The fourth is safety, which examines physical protection of people (including assistive living technologies that allow those with cognitive or physical impairment to live safe and dignified independent lives) and property, especially property vulnerability to catastrophic damage from water intrusion. Fifth, we examine sustainability and how it can be built into home life, including the materials and systems of the home itself. Sixth, we examine the connectivity of all of these components and systems, and how they must work well together to bring about a home life that supports human habitation reliably and intuitively. Finally, the report looks at how appliances are gaining new intelligence to help lessen the household workload.

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Webrain believes that technology by nature should provide quiet behind-the-scenes support rather than a distraction and annoyance to people. As home technology continues to evolve, devices in the home may become so integrated into our lives that we are unaware of their presence.