How Smart Homes Affect Relationships

I came across this interesting article by Patricia Pixie all about harmonising and enhancing relationships. She talks about how smart homes affect relationships. One of the main key benefits of a smart home is the ability to streamline household management so that it reduces daily tasks and therefore allows couples more time to focus on enjoying each other.

All the different ways a smart home makes your life easier allow more time to be freed up for couples to engage in meaningful experiences and activities together. Smart homes can also help build better teamwork between them and communication it allows them to coordinate and work together through synchronized system. Smart homes can also create different atmospheres that can improve mood and therefore improve relationships.

I think this is a really fascinating way that we don't automatically assume that smart homes have an effect, when I consider smart home devices I think about all the ways that they can improve me and my life but not necessarily about how they improve the household as a whole. This is a way of utilizing smart technology to really improve people's lives and relationships.

https://medium.com/@patypixie/building-harmony-and-shared-experiences-how-smart-homes-enhance-relationships-aff32862afeb

Potential Impacts of Smart Homes on Human Behavior: A Reinforcement Learning Approach

They set up the study by

• Model a smart home with RL to learn to optimize ambient parameters—namely, temperature and humidity for maximizing human agents’ comfort.
• Well-established physics laws of heating and humidity.
• Additional experiments to consider a scenario where two human models simultaneously pursue their activities and try to optimize their comfort in parallel in a home environment.
• Our smart home was based on Q-learning and learns the preferences of the human model for each activity.
• We observed that human models with reward functions different than the one our smart home was trained with, showed behavior anomalies such as frequent switching and an increase in the time required to set the thermal preferences.
• A model different than the one for which the SHS (Smart Home System) was designed for could lead to frequent activity switching and frequent change to the temperature and humidity.

https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/abstract/document/9612040?casa_token=rrJzDjMYpX0AAAAA:Iei18crqRLdTkLHO-fULJyaz5fN4Bjy2WJMsgcnJfgD-isLg2yaEpWtV8oe3fz6KTKPtlw5iAg

Social impacts and control in the smart home

This research paper discusses how a smart home impacts energy, lifestyle, and control. Here is some of the information I thought was relevant and interesting from this paper.

Energy

• The European Commission’s Strategic Energy Technology (SET) Plan includes a 2030 target for 80% of energy consumption to be controllable through ICT in 80% of homes.
• Residents can view energy consumption data, automatically run some appliances when electricity is less expensive, and switch unused appliances off.
• (10 households over 9 months), reported that smart home technologies can increase home energy use and generate technical and social disruptions for households.