Integrating Smart Home Devices for a Digital Lifestyle

(Michael Janto)

Home devices has been always the daily uses, and most needed to survive. Different categories (food, drinks, clothing, or even cleaning), different seasons, and different events. Many developments can be seen from the modern technologies that has been released such as electrical stove for cooking needs, but there has always been one problem. That is as technologies are compromised to the control of one device, the smartphone, manual control is becoming a challenge to overcome. On having these home devices controllable from a device, we carry everywhere, makes it easier to monitor. But how would they prove to be effective on the daily use? What are the benefit and disadvantages of it? And how will it continue to improve to the future?

Starting from on its practical application, we can take example of Samsung’s ecosystem devices. Samsung has an aim to connect them all to the ecosystem they call ‘SmartThings’ which is a default feature that all Samsung smartphones get to connect between devices from the same company. They started from refrigerators and washing machines. On refrigerators, you are now able to change the temperature and check what’s inside the refrigerator with a built-in camera. This helps people to do their groceries or check if their vegetables are still fresh, on the other hand they could increase the temperature if they want to prepare a refreshing drink. While on their washing machines, it allows you to choose the cycle and start them from afar. Once the cycle has started, you’ll have the app to monitor its progress. These are just the start of Samsung’s ecosystem Digital Lifestyle, they have developed more into making Smart TV’s, Digital AC’s, Projectors, Air purifiers, CCTVs, and even to the simplest application such as switches for electronics (e.g., switch for the lamp).

Benefits of the Digital Lifestyle is that it helps controlling and monitoring from anywhere and anytime. These devices are made to make the modern changes from manual tasks to digital or automated. But it has proved to be useful for the elderlies or people with disabilities. As it is still a developing change of lifestyle, the prices of these devices are still expensive. Therefore, few people have them, and the buyers are from people who needs it. This has promised a demand in the market, with a purpose for the innovations the companies have thought of. But there are many disadvantages to it. Having a Digital Lifestyle requires the infrastructure to support. Whereas for countries like Indonesia, having the luxury to connect to an internet is not available for everyone yet. Many are still deserted without signal to connect to and are living with the old lifestyle of telephones, letters or buying things by feet and not through the online services provided.

In conclusion, smart home devices are a very innovative development. It has solved the difficulties for elderlies and disabilities, while most houses are still having the traditional devices and controls. It must be considered that it’s still the start of transferring the lifestyle, means that there are still many drawbacks. First is pricewise, these devices can be expensive and would generate a high electricity bill as it needs more power to continuously connect to the network and send signals to be read from the app. Second is infrastructure, it can be divided to two which is the country’s infrastructure and the developers. Starting from the problem that countries have that is the uneven distribution of network reach, this limits the development of smart devices as they won’t have much demand and won’t prove to be as profitable. Because of that, many companies might refer to make innovation on the future. Other than the country, developers are also a main key to make the infrastructures of these houses can be fitted with the devices (For a comparison, it’s hard to convert a patrol car to an EV as they have a different structure). Regardless, the change of lifestyle can’t be avoided as technologies won’t stop engaging with our lives.