I’m walking into the home of the 21st century at George Washington University’s Virginia Campus. The home knows who I am by an RFID (radio frequency Identifcation) chip.
RFID chips give off information when scanned by a special receiver. They’ve been implanted into pets so “lost” owners can be contacted. The chips can be used in tracking retail products, moving through the checkout line more quickly at the grocery store, and may eventually replace barcodes on most products.
You could put these chips into or on almost anything, and they can be tracked as you move around the house, or help you find the keys you tossed someone last night.
The mock up house is a few furnished rooms. Everything looks routine, but it’s all hooked up together – sensors, networking, software, the Internet.
When the smart house sees you’re there, it can make changes – set the temperature, turn on tv, music, whatever you’ve preset. “You set that as a prerequisite and when you enter the house, it sees if you’re the only person with the priority levels set, it will do all the tasks which you have pre-assigned,” says Chedan Karani, a GW graduate student.
You also can control much of the house with either small computers or handheld devices as you move from room to room. Turning the lights off or on from any room or anywhere. That’s a much longer reach than the “Clapper.” And all can be control from anywhere there is an Interent connection (with appropriate security measures in place).
The kitchen is a big area for networking. The appliances, the toaster, microwave can be networked – again RFID to locate and identify items, especially in the refrigerator. Olga Gelbart is a GW Doctoral Student: “Potentially every item in the refrigerator might have an RFID tag. So the refrigerator will tell you what’s inside. It will tell you your milk’s going to be expired tomorrow, or that you don’t have any more bread and you should order it. Or, if you come home late, you can ask it, what do I have in the refrigerator? Can you suggest me a potential recipe or something?”
It is too much information? Security and privacy are major issues. “Do I really want my house tracking me? Do I really want my house keeping all this data about me,” asks Prof. Dianne Martin, who heads the Project. “Do I want my house to know who I am because it has to figure out how much I weigh, and do I want that piece of data in the database where somebody could perhaps break in from outside and find out a lot of personal information?” Martin says it’s a balance.
America Online and Virginia’s Center for Innovative Technology help GW start the Home of the 21st Century or H21C. Professor Martin is hoping local biometric companies will now join GW in phase II of the lab in making our future homes more secure.
From NBC4