In the world of smart home technology, there’s a lot of talk at the moment about how smart homes will soon be able to harness the power of wearables to help improve the health of smart home occupants.
But even without using wearables to monitor the health of residents, smart homes already have health benefits.
Here’s an insight into how smart homes improve your health.
Breathe easy
Your home should be a sanctuary but for anyone who suffers allergies or breathing difficulties sometimes it’s anything but a haven, and it makes keeping the home free of pollutants and dust essential.
Among the many things a smart home can do is monitor air quality. Indoor air quality can deteriorate for a number of reasons – ranging from cooking to painting, general dust and even appliance usage.
The smart home can also help you act on air quality information, allowing you to open ventilation, or automatically open windows and doors.
Meanwhile, specific sensors like CO sensors and smoke sensors can alert you to the very real dangers of carbon monoxide or smoke.
Ambient temperature
A feature that draws many people to smart home technology is automated climate control. This allows the smart home to detect the home’s temperature and activate cooling or heating when required.
The smart home can detect when occupants are home or be alerted to a resident’s impending arrival, meaning whenever you enter the house it’s a comfortable temperature.
In terms of health, this has major benefits, as temperature fluctuations are linked to common illnesses like colds or even dehydration.
In fact, the Sydney Morning Herald reports in Australia 6.5 per cent of deaths each year are attributed to the cold, while 0.5 per cent are due to heat.
Sleep
Not only can the smart home keep you comfortable, it can also assist with essential functions like sleep.
Smart homes can be automated to gently dim the lights in the lead-up to bedtime, and close curtains or blinds when nighttime begins to fall. The smart home can assist children go to sleep with night lighting and even music.
It can also help reduce extraneous noise or lighting by shutting down all appliances in your room. And if you wake in the middle of the night, the smart home can be set to gently turn on lights in corridors or bathrooms when it senses motion.
Come morning, the smart home can wake you gently by opening blinds to allow in the natural light of the day.
All of these features can help improve the quality of your sleep, and with lack of sleep attributed to a number of serious diseases, a good sleep is a health benefit no-one can afford to ignore.
In the future
The future of smart home technology offers a wealth of health potential.
Wearable technology like smart watches will allow an insight into a resident’s physical condition, such as their heart rate, sleep patterns and blood pressure. The smart home will be able to react, offering suggestions, changing the environment or even alerting emergency services or a relative if something is amiss.
And Forbes notes the potential of the smart home also extends further.
“The potential health-focused applications for smart homes go on from there – smart refrigerators could track nutrition, for example…”
About Lera
Lera Smart Home Solutions is a leading installer of smart home technology in the greater Sydney region. Our team boasts over 20 years’ experience in IT networking, programming and the electrical industry.
We have sourced the most reliable and cost efficient solutions from around the world to provide the very best in smart home solutions, and work with our clients to understand their needs.
You can learn more about transforming your house into a smart home here, or contact us directly for further advice.
