SmartThings Wants To Make Samsung Work Harder In Your Home Home automation platform SmartThings unveiled Wednesday new modules for support for Samsung devices. This in itself is not surprising, given that Samsung acquired SmartThings in August. What’s new is the extended functionality it lends to your home appliances. See also: Samsung Buys Smart-Home Outfit SmartThings, Reportedly For $200 Million With SmartThings integration, your fridge isn’t just a fridge. It’s a central hub that takes the features a refrigerator usually uses for keeping your food cold, and utilizes them for the additional tasks of monitoring the humidity and temperature in your home. If there’s a leak in the basement, your fridge will know—and alert you on your phone. Neither is your vacuum simply a vacuum. Thanks to the Roomba boom just about everyone is familiar with the convenience of a tiny robot that cleans your floor, but SmartThings takes it a step further. It utilizes the robot’s ambulatory abilities as a security guard. When SmartThings detects unexpected movement around your home, it can deploy the vacuum to investigate, and use the vacuum’s camera to monitor what’s going on. Additional modules include support for a Samsung air conditioner and laundry machine, which will be utilized to monitor and conserve energy use. Aside from remote controls and alerts for using the appliances for their original purpose, you will also be able to track energy usage and control the temperature in the house when you’re not there. See also: Why Samsung Buying SmartThings Should Have Us Worried Our appliances contain sophisticated computer mechanisms, and may already be smarter than they seem—we’re just not using them to their full potential. SmartThings’ goal seems to be to make each Samsung appliance a multitasker, utilizing them in unexpected ways. SmartThings devices are currently on sale in North America, but expected to make their way to the global marketplace sometime in 2015. Photo via SmartThings ReadWrite ift.tt/pLLLX3
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 21:20:04 +0000
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