Domestic Automation: What is it?

Domestic automation is an expression we have coined to describe software which helps us run households. Examples of domestic automation products include personal finance programs, electronic calendars, online banking, online shopping, home automation, home security, menu planning, and similar products.

Today, we look at these products as being special purpose. In the near future, changes in home computing technology will cause us to see them as pieces of a more substantial, integrated household management system.

The Coming Changes in Home Computing

Ten years ago only a few people knew what the Internet was or what “email me” meant. What we have just witnessed is the transition from “personal computing” to “network computing”. Instead of islands of automation, we are all now tapping into one incredibly large network of computers, cooperatively sharing whatever information or applications we happen to need.

As dramatic as this transition to network computing has been, we are about to go though an even more dramatic change.

The easiest way to describe what is coming is to just say that we are all about to get our own personal versions of “H.A.L.”, the spooky robot voice which followed the astronauts around in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey.

What will your own personal H.A.L. look like? Here are the key features:

Every home will have a network of computerized devices in it
The computerized devices will range from simple equipment such as a heat sensors or door open detectors to powerful, multi-function devices like today’s personal computers
The network will be on all the time, just like our heating, electrical, telephone, and cable systems today
The network will probably talk to us and maintain itself based upon minimal verbal input
The network will no longer require a nerd mentality to understand and operate
The devices and the network will be much more flexible in adopting new capabilities: Just as humans do, they will add and modify behaviors continuously in response to what’s going on

The changes leading up to this scenario are mostly technical. Below we list some of the highlights. The thing to notice about these changes is that virtually all of them are already currently available!

Ubiquitous network access

In just the last twelve months there have been major announcements by PC, consumer electronic, and other manufacturers of standards for short and medium range high-speed wireless communications. The cell-phone companies are also introducing new high-speed, wide-area wireless access to the internet. The standards cover wireless and wired communication techniques such as over the coaxial wires for cable, the telephone lines, and the power lines in a home.

Inside homes and offices, there will be low cost, low power, short range wireless radio transmitters that are cheap (costing just pennies) which can transmit data at slow, medium, and high speeds over distances of five feet to several hundred feet.

The new standards are addressing a range of requirements, which is important: They achieve a much better matching between the costs of network access and the performance required for each application.

What this means for consumers is that we and our "gear" can now connect to the internet absolutely wherever we are. Putting this in perspective, the most difficult application to support, wireless video distribution in the home, requires transmission speeds of 5 to 30 megabytes of data per second with no dropouts. That is a lot of information to move around wirelessly in any environment.

Ability to interface with anything

Today, there are still many different types of plugs and cables to interface between computers, networks, and other devices. The plugs and cables are expensive, and, they make installing new systems and devices too complicated even for knowledgeable users.

The wireless and wired capabilities described above will blow away all this complexity and cost. Besides eliminating the wires, new devices are close to being self-configuring. Some products such as residential gateway even have built-in web servers that anyone can access, understand, and use.

What this means is that all you will need to do to install a new device in your home is to just set it down and plug it in. The devices will take care of most if not all of their own set-up.

Putting this in perspective, a new internet addressing scheme, IPv6, has been developed which increases the number of available internet addresses from a current limit of 4.3 billion to a number so large it is easier to think of in terms of the number of addresses per square meter: 665,570,793,348,866,943,898,599 addresses per square meter of the surface of the planet Earth! The idea of an internet-enabled refrigerator may sound goofy, but, this is in fact what today's manufacturers are laying the groundwork for.

Easy access to private data

Convenient methods for user authentication have been developed such as finger print readers. These are important because they ensure users can get on the internet and access their private data and applications remotely as easily as they can do in their own home. Such widespread, ready access to the Internet will eventually free us from dependency on specific computing devices and physical hookups. We’ll just use whatever device is available wherever we happen to be.

Device specific controls are going virtual

Touch screens--such as are found on personal digital assistants--have made it possible for a large variety of control screens to be presented to users on devices of any size. The day of five controllers for the home stereo will soon be over. And, we'll eventually get away from other standard user-device interfaces such as to heating systems, even light switches. Devices in the home will become simpler and generally multi-purpose. This will save us money, un-clutter our homes, and simplify our lives.

Relationships with outside service providers are going virtual too

Stores no longer have to have “brick and mortar”, just a website. Services such as online banking will be used by most consumers. Employees can work from home, while on the road, etc., never really leaving the same virtual office. In time, every home will be partially integrated operationally with a number of outside service providers: employers, financial service providers, home security monitoring services, medical and legal professionals . . . . The list will be long. Today it is not obvious what the effect of this will be. Tomorrow, when you are using your personal household management system/network, you'll really feel that your system extends beyond your home to include these outside providers on a day-to-day basis.

Modular, self-sufficient systems

Today, even a person with a single PC is forced to become a network administrator, assigning passwords, loading up virus protection software, etc. In the future, home computer systems will either require no user assistance to operate or will be administered by outside providers. The user will also be able to integrate bits and pieces of software into their “local” system to get just the right mix of functionality and logic.

Further, your data will be shared across components. Software problems will be quickly isolated by the system, much like a circuit breaker will trip before a shorted plug can cause a fire in a home. And, many components will be supplied and maintained by outside providers: Microsoft’s automatic update service and the anti-virus software companies virus definition subscription services are existing examples of this.

This evolution of the home computing environment from large applications to software "chunks" will free users’ time up to concentrate on understanding and configuring the logic of their systems rather than looking for the right cables, system utilities, or big applications. Each of us will stitch together the capabilities we need for our situations.

Systems will be more helpful

Software components will incorporate more and more forms of artificial intelligence, configuring their behaviors to conform to user attributes and usage patterns. They will anticipate user needs and take care of tasks such as cleaning up old emails or temporary files without user involvement.

How These Changes Will Affect Housekeeping and Household Management

The average family has 6 to 10 hours per day of non-paid work to perform to take care of things like meal preparation, housekeeping, bills, shopping, childcare, and other largely routine tasks. Until now, most of this work was difficult to automate in a meaningful way as it required physical labor and/or tended to be highly variable or spontaneous.

With the new home network technologies, we will be able to turn over to the computer system many more mundane activities such as adjusting the heat and the lights and personal scheduling. Inputting data will be easier too: The different systems will share data, and, when we finally get a voice interface, we will no longer have to type every piece of information by hand into the computer. The systems will be self-configuring and adapt themselves with little to no thought on our part.

There are already examples of products which can take a lot of the work out of various housekeeping/household management tasks. Personal financial software is an obvious example. Another would be meal planning software. Several available products allow a family to plan its menu for the next week or month, translate the menu into lists of materials, and then tally up the materials in the form of shopping lists. Some will even sort the items on the shopping list so that they are in the same order as they will show up on the aisles in your local grocery store.

In some cities today you can shop for groceries online and let your meal planning system generate most of your order. There are also companies which will sell you frozen foods under a defined, multi-month meal plan, not necessarily saving money, but, improving the quality of the food and reducing your cooking time and your shopping time even if you don’t shop online.

Some of these products are awkward to use or seem to require more work than the value they deliver. The new computing environment will alter the perceived costs and benefits of these types of applications. With time, these products will certainly become more powerful and easier to use even as they become less costly or difficult to maintain.

How the Maidomatic Automatic Chores Scheduler Fits With the Changes

Housework isn’t going away, nor is answering the mail or cooking. The Maidomatic Automated Chores Scheduler will simply be a tool to generate a schedule for doing routine activities according to a schedule and in an efficient manner. It will do this by breaking up the work into a set of routines you can perform during set time periods of the day, week, month, and year. The routines will be developed by housecleaning experts and so will be fast initially and become faster still as you benefit from the effect of practicing a good routine until it becomes a habit.

In the new computing environment, you’ll use your computer to schedule many activities in your home, so scheduling chores will be just one activity being tracked by your system. It will all be just another form of domestic automation . . . .