AUSTIN, Texas – Bill Bodin has no excuse for going out to lunch. He has – without a doubt – the coolest kitchen in town. It talks. It cooks. It can be controlled from his cell phone, PDA, pager or laptop. And it’s all in his workplace, a sleek computing lab at IBM.
The appliances in this model kitchen are, needless to say, a bit more advanced than those in most of our homes. The Whirlpool Polara refrigerated range has a chilling system in the oven, so you can safely place a casserole in it as you leave for work, program it to switch to heat at a certain time and have a hot lasagna ready when you walk in the door.
If you get tied up at work or stuck in traffic, with this kitchen of the future, you can contact the Internet-enabled range via your cell phone or computer and change the programming to allow for the delay. The oven, which was tested with a breakfast casserole, is available to consumers now, but without the Internet capability.
The Mealtime kitchen is a pilot program of the Internet Home Alliance, a nonprofit group of companies that include IBM, Whirlpool, Sears, Icebox and Hewlett-Packard that are collaborating on home technology.
It’s the kitchen’s networking that is the new frontier – people talking to appliances, appliances talking to people and appliances talking to one another. In the tech world, “residential gateway” is the generic term for the embedded computer system that makes all this stuff work.
To demonstrate, Bodin, with a grin, hits a command on his cell phone and the ceiling fan in the kitchen comes on instantly. In the span of a second, the phone has signaled a server in Denver to cut the fan on in Austin, and it has responded.
“Three thousand miles in a second is not too bad,” says Bodin, a senior technical staff member of IBM and chief technology officer for Internet Home Alliance.
As the fan whirs softly, he enthusiastically shows off this smart kitchen’s other tricks. He flips a switch on an iron on the counter. Suddenly, a computerized voice sternly announces over the intercom: “Your iron is on a high setting and possibly unsafe.”
This is a $10 iron, Bodin says, with a dollar’s worth of technology added. While you can’t call that iron from the car yet and ask it if you left it on, the capability is there.
Bodin pushes two bottles of medicine close together on a wireless countertop in the U-shaped kitchen. Again, the vaguely Orwellian computer voice interjects, cautioning that combining the two medicines – Paxil and St. John’s wort – could be dangerous. How did it know? The bottles had tags on them that could be read by the counter.
Under a kitchen cabinet, Martha Stewart is shown frying french fries on a wireless Sony television screen that can access the Internet. A flip-down, flat-screen Icebox computer can be used for programming and monitoring. It also offers television, DVD, CD and Internet capabilities. And the cordless keyboard is dishwasher safe.
The Web-enabled touch display on the prototype refrigerator provides a wealth of information. Touch one command, and it becomes a calendar listing an entire family’s schedule, downloaded from a PDA (that’s a personal digital assistant such as a Palm Pilot). Hit another setting, and it will grab a school-lunch menu off the Internet. Punch the pad for photos, and it displays digital family pictures from that ski trip to Colorado. You can do more: access the Internet, make a shopping list, inventory the fridge. It can all be done with the touch of a finger.
There is more to come. Bodin says the lab is working on a system that would prioritize leftovers and perishables in the fridge – and perhaps provide recipes with the ingredients of those foods that need to be used first.
How would the fridge know its own contents? Interior cameras could act as monitors. Or an antenna that looks like a picture frame would scan all the items marked with RFID tags (that’s radio frequency identification). It might even provide a “freshness quotient,” letting you know if your teenage son has left the milk out on the counter too long.
You don’t even have to be standing in front of the appliance to learn all this. The technology is available to see the fridge data on your computer at work or on your PDA while you are walking the grocery aisles wondering if you need to buy orange juice.
Alas, this high-tech kitchen doesn’t do dishes. Not yet. It lacks a dishwasher, and the sink is not functional. It even has a sign warning users not to pour water down the drain, because electrical equipment is housed in the cabinet below. But Bodin says another lab boasts an Internet-connected dishwasher that, among other things, can tell you when you are out of Jet-Dry.
Although the microwave oven was disabled on a recent visit, the IBM lab is working on an Internet-based version that could receive complex recipes from a server – something more sophisticated than “punch 10 for popcorn.”
This futuristic kitchen is not as far-fetched as you might think. By the end of this year, 20 million people will have broadband access, according to Parks Associates, a Dallas market research firm. By the end of this year, 11 million people will have some form of a home network, which means they will be able to connect their appliances. And all of the technology in the lab is wireless, so it would not be limited to new homes.
In fact, the Mealtime innovations have been put into 20 Boston-area homes for six months to test which are essential kitchen improvements and which, if any, will prove as annoying as computer pop-up ads. Price will also be factored in. The Polara range, for example, runs close to $2,000, roughly twice as much as a regular one. Findings will be announced next year.
Tim Woods, vice president of pilot programs for Internet Home Alliance, says Mealtime is the first technology solution ever tested to simplify life for time-crunched families wanting healthful home-cooked meals. Manufacturers await the results. “What we learn from the Mealtime pilot will drive much of what we do in terms of future product development,” says Henry Marcy, a vice president of Whirlpool.
Meanwhile, back in the lab, the Polara range has understood the commands keyed in at the start of our visit, and yummy smells fill the kitchen. IBM software engineers – no dummies – are circling, but Bodin has a few more moves to demonstrate before dishing up the egg, ham and sausage casserole.
Remotely, he opens and closes the blinds (you could do this from afar on vacation) and turns lights on and off. He talks about how you can water the lawn remotely, even integrating the sprinkler system with Doppler weather data to minimize consumption. He enthusiastically describes how the researchers are working on preventive-maintenance technology so appliances such as the freezer can tell you when they’re about to give out. He discusses cars that can remind you to get milk on the way home because they have been chatting with your fridge.
Bodin talks a lot. But, then, so does his kitchen.
>From Marin Independent Journal