The concept of the home of the future, or a ’smart home’, has been explored since at least the early 20th century. In a smart home, the residents will be able to control everything from lighting and heating to security, audio and video systems by the touch of a button, or perhaps just by entering a room, if the system is able to identify each resident and automatically adjust the settings to the person’s own preferences.

There are now a few standards for home automation systems (aka domotics) for communicating with and automating different home electronic devices and appliances which normally work independently. Nokia’s idea is to use the existing standards and employ the cell phone as the central control device for everything in the system.

The Nokia Home Control Center,
due to go on sale in the UK and Germany at the end of next year, will
run the open-source Linux operating system, meaning that third-party
manufacturers of fridges, televisions, vacuum cleaners and other common
appliances will be able to build compatible technology into their
devices more easily and at low cost. Initially the system will be used
to help people control heating in their home, but in the future many
more systems should be able to connect up to the Home Control Center.
In order for the system to work, all appliances will of course need to
be connected to the same network, which means that building the system
won’t be as easy as setting up the software and starting to send
messages. The smart home will need to be built piece-by-piece by
getting new appliances that can connect to the system.

Nokia
argues that while the building blocks for so-called smart home
technology have been available for years, there has been no one,
central device to pull all the devices together. A cell phone is an
ideal device to control the system not just at home, but also from
away. Imagine running a hot bath so that it’s ready right when you
arrive home from work? I wonder how insurance companies will cover the
system from malfunctions and software bugs.

Similarly, the
iPhone could, of course, be an ideal device for home control, and maybe
there’s even an easier way than what Nokia suggests to operate the
system. How about using just Bluetooth, infrared and SMS to control
essential systems like heating and cooling? In Finland, where there is
a built-in-sauna in almost every house, it’s been possible to use a
cell phone to control the sauna for quite some time. And in South
Korea, where some buildings use fingerprint access instead of
conventional keys, and super-fast broadband networks connect most
devices, the local giants Samsung and LG are probably brewing their own
solutions.

Karri Ojanen