NAIROBI, KENYA: The advent of tight working schedules and multitasking has heralded an era of intelligent, and sometimes robotic, home appliances that are reclaiming time for overstretched professionals.
With a burgeoning middle class living on the fast lane and working on a razor-thin schedule, the demand for time-saving home appliances is on the rise.
This demand is compelling electronics manufactures to continuously innovate and keep up with emerging trends. They are now designing home appliances that minimise the effort that goes into daily chores to give users more free time to attend to priority tasks.
The trend has ignited a race by manufacturers to increase their range of ‘intelligent’ product portfolio in the home appliances category. Consumers are now increasingly keen on establishing appliance’s ability to minimise on effort and save time before purchase.
Manufacturers have now increased commitment to enhancing the practicality of products that extends beyond the high tech world of tablets and smart phones into changing the way that consumers interact with basic home appliances, end result being the birth of ‘intelligent’ home appliances.
Appliances are progressively becoming smartened up thanks to sensors and other embedded technologies. They are becoming intelligent by integration with mobile devices and the internet. This ‘intelligent’ quality ultimately enhances human capabilities.
South Korean home appliances titans LG and Samsung are seen to be at the fore front of this transformation. They both believe that while appliances are all capable of functioning independently, the more they are used together, the clearer their benefits become.
Guided by this philosophy, LG engineers and designers have developed their own distinctive take on what it means to create products with an intuitive responsiveness to the demands of users.
The company recently introduced ‘LG Smart Home’, which is built around the idea of unifying multiple smart appliances into a single, cohesive system in order to increase convenience and simplicity.
Coupled with its interactive new feature HomeChat™, which employs Natural Language Processing (NLP) and LINE, the popular mobile messenger app with over 300 million users, homeowners can communicate, control, monitor and share content with LG’s latest smart appliances.
To illustrate this, the company’s smart refrigerator has several innovative, convenience-enhancing features such as Smart View, Smart Power Saving and Smart Manager. Smart View employs the industry’s first built-internal refrigerator camera to allow users to see the content of the refrigerator using a smartphone or tablet.
Every time the fridge door is opened, the camera captures images of the interior shelves. Users can check these images through HomeChat™ to quickly assess what they need to buy while they’re at the supermarket, helping to save time and preventing unnecessary purchases.
Moreover, LG Smart Manager also transforms the refrigerator into a complete food management system with a handy recipe search function which presents the user with a variety of tasty meal options based on the items stored in the refrigerator.
When it comes to washing machines, LG’s smart washing machine is equipped with several smart technologies that simplify the task of doing laundry. Guided Laundry can recommend and automatically apply the optimal settings for any type of laundering scenario. For example, for orange juice spills, simply texting “remove juice stains” on HomeChat™ will initiate One Touch Washing to prescribe the appropriate course of action.
On the other hand, Samsung equally provides a wide range of product portfolio including fridge, washing machine and a robot cleaner.
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It has an intelligent home solution that provides connectivity to all home devices, which could be managed through an integrated interface on smart phone and smart TV.
Samsung’s smart home application integrates and connects all smart home devices on one device controller.
Status of connected home appliances can be monitored on Smart TV. Pop-up notification synced with washer can inform consumers the laundry status on TV screen with notice sound.
Samsung refrigerator helps users keep grocery lists, search recipes, upload photos, check weather, read news updates and even check Twitter.
It is LG though that appears to be leading the pack in making people’s lives easier and more comfortable, its recent launch of Hom-Bot Square a cordless robot vacuum cleaner seems to have set it apart from competition.
The cleaner has a feature that enables it to monitor the home while the owner is away. If the unit senses any movement, its integrated cameras automatically take photos of the room and send them to the homeowner’s smartphone.
The company is constantly working on ways to enhance smart usability; the task at hand now is to make these appliances available and affordable to Kenyans.
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