The Future Home in the 5G Era summary

WiFi-enabled TVs, smart thermostats, automated grocery delivery – many homes today are already enhanced by digital services and devices. 

But even though these gadgets are connected to the internet, they’re not connected to each other. Your Philips smart light and your Apple TV, for instance, can’t communicate to create the perfect lighting ambience for your movie night.

Yet this is precisely what a truly smart home should be able to do: coordinate a variety of digital services and devices to perfectly suit your needs.

The key message here is: Our Future Homes will be hyper-connected, hyper-personalized technology hubs. 

What would a perfect Future Home look like? 

In order to get a sense of what’s possible, let’s imagine a day in the life of an average family living in the Future Home era. Meet the Smiths. 

It’s Saturday morning, and husband Paul is playing with his 2-year-old son Winnie in the garden. In the background, an autonomous lawn mower quietly clips the yard. Paul is trying to teach Winnie how to count to 10, but he’s interrupted when his wife Susan calls him into the house. So Paul hands Winnie a smart, talking teddy bear that picks up with the counting lesson where he left off. The teddy bear also has a nanny cam, so it can send an alert to both parents should it sense any danger to Winnie. 

Inside, Paul finds his wife Susan reprimanding their 8-year-old daughter Katherine for breaking one of the smart smoke detectors with her bouncy ball. The home command node has immediately registered the damage, and the digital voice assistant now asks Susan if she wants to order a replacement. Susan agrees, and the new smoke detector is delivered by drone within an hour. When it arrives, she just has to take it out of the box and plug it into its socket – no setup, no installment – and the new device is immediately integrated into the central network. 

In the afternoon, Susan has her yearly at-home physical examination. She goes to a designated room in the house, where her doctor greets her over video chat. The doctor can measure Susan’s vitals over her smart wristband. Good news – her blood pressure has lowered! To celebrate, Susan takes Katherine on a virtual walk with grandma Dottie. 

Seamless, easy-to-use, and interactive – the Smiths live in the ideal Future Home. By integrating a number of digital services and devices, it can solve simple problems on its own, assist with complex ones, and anticipate future issues. 

And this wasn’t simply an exercise in imagination. As we’ll see in the next blink, such Future Homes could be just around the corner.