Two cans of lager and a packet of cheese?
Each January, Las Vegas hosts the massive Consumer Electronics Show where the world's manufacturers gather to show off the latest ideas for the industry and place their bets on future trends. A recurrent theme this year was connectivity in appliances.
Both LG and Sony have demonstrated a range of devices which will be able to communicate with mobile handsets across Bluetooth or WiFi and allow your phone or tablet to become a ubiquitous remote control for your TV, your microwave or your smart robot vacuum cleaner.
For instance, LG has incorporated Near Field Communications capabilities (NFC) into a range of smart refrigerators which can be controlled thorough LG's Smart Manager app suite. The vision is that you tap your NFC-enabled phone or tablet against the smart fridge and it networks itself to the appliance. You then use your screen to check what's inside the fridge, how long things have been in there, have your phone suggest and download recipes off the internet based on your available ingredients, count calories for your diet plan, and automatically add items to your shopping list as you use them up.
Now call me old fashioned, but if I find it easy enough to check what's inside the fridge using the remarkably low-tech method of opening the door and peering inside, and I didn't even need a user manual to figure out how to do it. I also wonder how a smart fridge would know what's going in and being taken out? Will it incorporate barcode scanners and RFID readers, or will the consumer have to perform data entry every time they go shopping? Even if its really smart, how will it know how many onions are left in the pickle jar, or how much ice cream has been guzzled from the tub in a midnight snack?
I expect the idea that your fridge can suggest recipes and help you compile the shopping list for ingredients will help sell these smart devices, it will sound cool to the app-generation leading busy lifestyles and demanding info at their fingertips,... but I'm not so sure those features will be used to any great extent once the novelty wears off. In an age when supermarkets sell salad ingredients in plastic bags for people who don't know how to chop up a lettuce leaf, when Jamie Oliver famously found out that some kids didn't know what a tomato was, and when ready-meals sell more than ever, how many consumers really do enough cooking to want this degree of domestic stock control by smart devices?
25th January 2013
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.