Have you ever poured yourself a bowl of cereal and then gone to the refrigerator to get the milk, only to find out that your child had finished it off and didn’t even bother to tell you? Well, I just may have the answer for you. LG introduced their new refrigerator, equipped with HomeChat, which allows you to send text messages to your fridge from a grocery store to find out what you have in stock, what you might need, and even if anything is about to expire. But that’s not the only new technology that’s coming our way…
Imagine being most anywhere in the world and being able to control your home’s lights and temperature, sending text messages to appliances or monitoring a home’s security and energy consumption…all from your smartphone.
The 2014 International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas was the place to be last week as several technology companies showed off their gadgets for smart-homes. 
Stuck at work and your husband calls to let you know that your mother-in-law will be stopping by the house and you haven’t vacuumed? Not to worry! All you need to do is whip out your smartphone and send a text message through HomeChat to your robotic vacuum cleaner and tell it to start. You can even find out the last time it cleaned, program a new vacuuming regimen, and designate specific areas of the house for it to reach. You’ll even be able to get a head start on dinner since you can, of course, text your smart oven and tell it to begin pre-heating.
Throw a load of clothes in the washer and then forget to start it? You guessed it. Send a text message to your smart washer and tell it to start, right down to what kind of cycle you want it to run.
HomeChat will also allow for broader programs that initiate a series of commands amongst all of your smart devices in your home. For example, you can tell your appliances “I am going on vacation.” The refrigerator would automatically go into power-saving mode and the vacuum could clean the house at a pre-set time right before you return. The oven might even respond just to say that it will miss cooking with you!
Smart homes can also be outfitted to capture predictive analytics that can help owners know when something is wrong. Very similar to the “Check Engine” light that you have in your car, smart home technology is being equipped to let you know when something is about to go wrong in the home.
Now that I’ve got you all excited I’ll have to burst your bubble a bit. Mass adoption of smart home technology is very likely still 10 years away. However, it is encouraging to note that smart home technologies have made significant strides in just the past few years.
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