What Will the Future of Connected Homes Look Like ? Our personal spaces are getting physically smaller, but growing virtually, thanks to the exponential boom in technology and connected devices

By the year 2020, the world is estimated to have more than 50 billion connected devices, which includes your phones, your home appliances, your cars and everything personally close to you. With the IoT wave just on the rise, the world is going to be massively interconnected and smarter.

The next evolution of homes is connected and smart homes. The concept not only includes control but intelligence as well, which will be built onto the home to let it manage itself autonomously. They will be able to understand the owner's location inside the home and adjust the lightings and other appliance settings accordingly, set up perfect mood lights and even pre cool the room when they are on their way home from an outside location. It won't just understand it's owners preferences but also respond to voice and gestures. This opens up new dimensions by which the users will interact and use their homes. A large and varied set of data points can be obtained from these connected and smart homes. By machine learning, the patterns present in these data points, the level of automation and user experience can be elevated to a completely another level.

A connected home can inform the neighbours and important stakeholders in case of fire breakouts , burglary or any other emergencies. Ip camera and video door phones of a connected home will help you identify criminals/social pests early-on. Gas leak and motion sensor are already being utilized to help users feel safe and secure. With the advancement of smart homes, security is becoming one of the strongest pillars of its foundation. It will help keep the property under surveillance 24x7 and also monitor the activities in real time.

Furthermore, Energy monitoring combined with AI (Artificial Intelligence) will be used for preventive maintenance of appliances, making sure they are taken care of before they are damaged and start hogging on more power. Monitoring power consumption in real-time can help plan and optimize use of appliances and help save on a lot of energy and money. Not only monitoring, future home will also be harvesting its own energy leading to sustainable homes which will be a great boost to the economy.

That said, the smart home market in India— at least, as it currently stands — is at its tipping point. Considering that there are approximately 11 crore urban households in India and also given the fact that India ranks second in the number of smartphone users around the globe, along with the steady increase in the spending power of the middle class, the opportunity is huge. If we look at the current trends, customers prefer tech that is easy, efficient and simple to implement. DIY or do-it-yourself approach is rapidly growing in popularity for assembling a smart home.

Research suggests that there is a massive rise in the estimated number of connected devices through the years -

Source:HP

Technology is going to make it happen really fast. The entire ecosystem is going to be pillared around some really great hardware, software and artificial intelligence systems to give consumers the best experience. As lover of technology, it really excites me to see how the future of homes is shaping up, and how not only some great architecture, but some really amazing and robust technology is playing a major role in it.

From a consumer's standpoint, there are going to be a lot of exciting and new gadgets to play with and interact with. After the advent and rise of smartphones, there are only incremental changes in technology available to the consumer. And in the language of Peter Thiel, Connected homes is going to be a zero to one change. Homes being a very personal asset, and with more and more people being technically inclined, the adoption of smart and connected homes is the next big thing. The evolution of homes is here.