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Last fall, 20 families in Boston got a glimpse of the future, right in their own kitchens. The Internet Home Alliance, a cross industry network of companies selling products and services for the connected home market, wanted to see if introducing technology into the kitchen could help make life easier for harried families. The alliance set up 20 state-of-the-art kitchens featuring broadband connections, refrigerators with Web access and ovens that double as refrigerators. The goal was to help families spend more quality time together and eat healthier — no easy task for dual-income families trying to balance work, homework and soccer practice.

“A lot of families are looking for that Norman Rockwell experience where the dad is standing at the end of the table carving a turkey,” said Tim Woods, vice president of ecosystem development for the Internet Home Alliance. “That reality evaporated in the U.S. over ten years ago, but it's still the ideal we live with.”

The Internet Home Alliance hoped to determine the degree to which consumers are ready to adopt and use Internet-enabled devices in the kitchen. The alliance outfitted each kitchen with a Polara refrigerated range from Whirlpool. It is an oven that can be programmed to keep food refrigerated until a certain time, automatically start cooking, and keep a dish warm until mealtime. Participants also used a Web-enabled refrigerator and a Web-based entertainment/command center called the Icebox Flipscreen, a small screen that mounts under a kitchen cabinet with a wireless, nearly indestructible keyboard that goes in the dishwasher!

“Before the Mealtime project, families would come home, hit the door and disperse — with moms and dads checking their e-mail and kids doing homework on the computer in their rooms,” Woods said. “What happened with Mealtime is that the family stayed in one room, and because they stayed together, they perceived they were eating healthier and spending more quality time together.”

If you think this scenario is some pie-in-the-sky ideal, think again. All of these products are commercially available. And, home technology experts say that innovation won't be limited to the kitchen. Instead, we'll likely see remarkable changes in every room of the house over the next five years. The driving force behind these changes is the proliferation of broadband networks combined with new home networking technologies, cheap sensors and inexpensive storage devices. With all these building blocks in place, the conversation is turning to applications. If you ask technologists at research labs what the home of the future will look like, they're likely to tell you about the services people will buy rather than which standards might prevail.

Across the country, in research labs and pilot projects, researchers are trying to figure out just how we'll combine these technologies to make life easier. Scientists at MIT, Georgia Tech and the University of Florida at Gainesville are looking to the future, trying to create applications and homes smart enough to assist aging baby boomers in retirement. The U.S. Army and Nielsen Media Research have partnered with Boston University's School of Management to develop home applications that will improve the day-to-day lives of soldiers and their families.

As baby boomers age, and the broken healthcare industry leaves people relying more and more on “self-care,” researchers think that healthcare in the home will become an important market. Sensors, which are only about $5 apiece, can monitor everything from a person's heart rate to indoor air quality.

Kenan Sahin thinks this is where the future lies. After selling Kenan Systems to Lucent Technologies for $1.5 billion in 1999, Sahin stayed with Lucent for two years and then decided to do something else. In 2002, Sahin purchased the technology and innovation business of Arthur D. Little, Inc., and he is now building a collaborative R&D firm called TIAX. Sahin plans to help academic, commercial and government clients turn ideas into products.

For one of his first projects, Sahin collaborated with MIT to create PlaceLab, an apartment-scale research facility where new technologies and design concepts are tested and evaluated in the context of everyday living. PlaceLab is a new tool for researching human interaction with technology in the home. Volunteers live in PlaceLab for days or weeks at a time and undergo intense scrutiny as they try out new products.

“The long term notion is to bring the academic institutions, medical community, building community, food industries and TIAX together to affect the design of the home and to incorporate certain technologies,” Sahin said.

Residents' health is where Sahin wants to start. Some of the research conducted at PlaceLab will center around developing cost-effective home-based early warning health systems. “Sensor technology, having come down in price, enables us to look at vital signs almost continuously,” said Sahin.

Sensing infrastructure can recognize patterns of sleep, eating and socializing. Changes in these patterns could signal emerging health problems. Researchers will also test non-invasive biometric monitoring devices and human-computer interactions that encourage healthy behaviors related to diet, exercise and medication. TIAX and PlaceLab will also look at technologies that balance indoor air quality.

“This is not a home of the future, it's not a demo home, it's just a straight-forward home, with observational devices, cameras, sensors and measurement devices,” said Sahin.

Other research projects focus more on meeting the needs of the elderly in retirement, in an effort to keep them in their homes longer. In January, researchers at the University of Florida opened a “smart house” in Gainesville, Fla., designed to help seniors live independently. The house, built by the University of Florida Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Technology for Successful Aging, features a detection system, with sensors in the bed and in the floor to monitor the occupant's location within the house. The floor sensors can also detect water leaks. The first smart house occupant is 76-year-old Minette Hendler, who wears an electronic sensor that transmits data to the home's network. The computer notifies a caregiver or relative if she falls or even if her walking speed changes.

The U.S. Army and Nielsen Media Research joined with Boston University's School of Management to create the home of the future for soldiers. This three-year-project, which began in December, seeks to improve the daily life of military families. The team will carefully study 450 military homes and is part of the U.S. Army's housing privatization effort to rebuild 70,000 military homes over the next five years. The idea is that if you can make life better for soldiers, you will have better soldiers. The project focuses on services surrounding healthcare, education and home operations.

“We're not so much focused on the technology, but on products and services,” said John Henderson, an information systems professor and the Technologically Connected Home research leader at Boston University School's of Management.

“We're assuming that there will be a broadband connection to the house, via either cable, or in some cases, DSL; the second assumption is that there will be a standard home PC,” Henderson said.

One of the first projects his team will implement is VoIP phone service for soldiers and their families. Not only is Boston University interested in the economics surrounding voice-over-IP (VoIP), but whether the richer connectivity can help improve communications between families and friends by sharing photos and documents as well. “Military families move a lot, and they're often isolated from extended families,” said Henderson. Also, the ability to retain the same phone number, even if a family moves overseas, can be important.

The Technologically Connected Home project will also look at how a better connection between the home and the health care system, particularly a hospital, can improve both the quality and costs of delivering health care service to the military family. For example, the study will look at whether an Army medical specialist could remotely diagnose the sudden illness of a sick child living on a remote post. With these connections, families and doctors can get real-time information and better monitor situations. “Our hypothesis is that the connected home can enable the family to take more control of their own health care status and that the family will become more involved in their healthcare,” Henderson said.

The third project Henderson's team will implement is Kid-Topia, essentially a walled Internet garden. Kid-Topia will target kids, ages 4-12, and give them access to all kinds of education-related activities, multimedia, games and chat rooms, which will be monitored. The idea is to give kids a G-rated Internet experience. There are also diagnostic tools set up to give parents recommendations about reading material or other assistance their child might need. This project tests the idea that a connected home can to give families enhanced information and performance assessments about their children and create a higher level of parental involvement in the child's education.

Researchers hope that these pilots on human guinea pigs will answer questions about who will use various advancements in home technology and how. Sometimes the pilots turn up unexpected answers. For instance, in the Mealtime Pilot, the Internet Home Alliance discovered that the project didn't significantly change the behavior of families — parents still checked e-mail in the evening, and kids still did homework — the project just changed where they did these things.

“The number one thing they loved about the pilot was the broadband connection in the kitchen with a device attached to it,” Woods said. Families also gave high marks to the Polara refrigerated range and the Icebox Flipscreen, which let them watch TV or DVDs, listen to CDs or surf the Web.

The project looked at the behavior of participants at the beginning, middle and end of the 8-month project. The Internet Home Alliance found that, slowly but surely, with entertainment in the kitchen, provided by the Icebox Flipscreen, the kitchen became the main congregating point for the family. And, certain behavior did begin to change over the course of the trial. For instance, families neglected the HP printer at first, but over time kids began to use it — mainly to print out homework. HP learned that families will use a printer in the kitchen but that they'd like it to be smaller, perhaps mounted under a cabinet and splash-proof. They'd also like it to fit better into the kitchen décor.

Because children spent more time in the kitchen, they also became more interested in helping prepare and plan meals. “They perceived they were eating healthier, although we couldn't prove it,” Woods said. “And, although they rarely all sat down together at the table, we delivered on the promise of families spending quality time together, strictly from having a broadband connection in the kitchen,” he said.

Another lesson learned from the Mealtime Pilot is that families like all these devices individually, but they don't necessarily need them connected to one another. For instance, families reported that they loved being able to keep a lasagna cool in the Polara refrigerated range and to have the scent of hot bubbly mozzarella greet them at the door. But controlling appliances with the cell phone that the Internet Home Alliance provided turned out to be awkward and the user interface needed improvement.

“Devices could have been connected with just a LAN connection; it didn't need to be a WAN connection,” said Woods. “Wide area applications only came into why they liked the Peapod service (to order groceries online) and the kids doing homework, but it had nothing to do with the devices themselves,” he said.

Still, Woods found the results of the project compelling enough to make some changes in his own life. Armed with a drill, Woods recently descended into his basement and began boring holes. He plans to put a laptop, with a broadband connection, into his kitchen.

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