A quick glance at my router’s list of attaches devices shows that my interest in connected devices, a.k.a. the Internet of Things, is work I take home with me.
I recently bought a Withings Smart Baby Monitor. I love my Sonos PLAY:3. My wife loves her FitBit Tracker, not itself connected to wifi, but synced wirelessly to its base station, connected to her laptop. For Father’s Day this year, I got an internet-capable TV, and I’ve had a Google TV for quite some time.
Plus, I’ve had my eye on the Nest thermostat since it first appeared, and I’ll eventually break down and get one. And today, I see the Netatmo Urban Weather Station (h/t Engadget), which is also now on my list.
For me, these devices have become kind of like a drug. Once I bought the first one, all the others looked even cooler to me.
Such is life in the modern home, where the iPad is quickly becoming the home’s de facto remote control, firmly cementing its primary use case as a lean-back device that rarely leaves home.
One thing missing for now is a cohesive ecosystem between devices and related services and data sharing between them. First, set aside the illusion that you have privacy. Next, imagine how these devices could share data to improve your physical world.
Nest could adjust the temperature in real time based on data collected by the Netatmo Urban Weather Station, applying your past history and usage thresholds to keep your environment optimally temperatured.
Sonos could play music based on the weather data from Netatmo, picking upbeat music on gray days, soothing tunes on very hots ones. FitBit could alter the calorie figures for very hot days, factoring in the extra exertion. The Withings Smart Baby Monitor, which measures temperature and humidity, could send alerts to Nest based on baby movement correlated with temperature changes, e.g. when the AC runs, the baby moves.
This is just the tip of the iceberg of what’s possible.
I love this stuff, don’t you? Find the comments.
