Will We Soon Be Communicating with Our Household Appliances?

According to a computer sciences expert from the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, household appliances that are able to communicate with us may only be a few years away.

Dr Kevin Curran said that in only five years, your fridge could be texting you that you are running low on milk, or your dishwasher could inform you remotely that it has finished its load and is ready to be emptied. Ultimately, we could be receiving more texts from our household appliances than from our friends.

“Within the next five years, using mobile devices simply for communication will seem outdated,” he declared.

Dr Curran has called this system that will allow consumers to remotely interact with pretty much every device they own the “Internet of Things”, or IoT. There are actually already some examples of this technology on the market right now, such as being able to control your lighting or heating with your mobile phone, or receiving alerts from your smoke detector.

He did warn, however, that there are some important factors to take into consideration and require critical focus if IoT is going to be taking control of our digital lives, such as standards, overburdened networks and internet security.

“Security needs to be a main priority for connected devices,” he explained, “especially since it will be difficult to tell if a toaster or refrigerator, which has no visual interface, has contracted a virus or malware.”

Because of this, he said that manufacturers of these products in the future will have to keep an eye on their networks and devices constantly, looking out for unusual activity as devices connected to the internet at the moment are monitored.

And while big companies like Samsung, Apple and Google are currently competing for brand loyalty, encouraging their customers to buy products exclusively integrated with their own, Dr Curran explained that this approach would be “strong-arming” consumers to only buy one brand, meaning that competing products wouldn’t actually be competing with each other and thus removing the consumer's ability to pick the best product for them.

With so many more devices connecting to the internet over the next few years, Dr Curran said that industry technicians need to focus on ensuring a fluid user experience, making this their primary objective before putting anything on the market.

Because it is unlikely this infrastructure development will occur immediately, limiting the number of devices on a given network would be a good way of easing IoT into our homes. “This will still allow the consumer to control features outside of the home but will limit the strain on networks and will maintain a level of privacy,” he explained.

Now, imagine the possibilities…