Tag Archives: smart home device

This universal smart home device transforms everyday objects – now picking up your mug turns on your kettle!

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Nowadays our homes are brimming with smart technology. Smart refrigerators keep our kitchens in order, smart televisions let us watch literally anything we’d like, and smart assistants handle the mood lighting. A future home filled only with iterations of Amazon Alexa and identical apple home products feels eerily within reach. Holding tight onto his souvenir mugs and granny’s kitchenware, designer Sam Beaney created Kano Sense, a universal smart home device that uses computer vision to convert everyday objects into smart home outputs.

Designer: Sam Beaney

A gleaming one-way mirror lens and soft wooden frame give Kano Sense a heavy and familiar look. Kano Sense takes the shape of common smart capsules similar to earlier generations of the Amazon Alexa and Echo and contains embedded smart computer vision that analyzes everyday appliances like ovens and even ceramic mugs to turn interactions with them into smart outputs.

Kano Sense ditches voice command for behavior-based technology. For example, after analyzing our interactions with a ceramic mug, Kano Sense will respond to our holding the mug by turning on the tea kettle. Similarly, a baking tray placed on top of the counter will tell Kano Sense to preheat the oven.





In creating Kano Sense, Beaney hoped to develop a form of smart technology that incorporated our keepsake home items, bridging next-level smart technology with our analog world. This meant that Beaney had to give Kano Sense a familiar feel and overall look. Kano Sense’s outermost body is carved from wood and its intricate computer hardware core is coated with a one-way mirror lens to reflect your home environment and simplify setup.

Complete with an accompanying app, Kano Sense scans new home items and appliances by your choice and command. In the app, users can tell Kano to scan only certain objects within the capsule’s vision using software similar to that of facial recognition. Don’t worry, not everything you touch will turn on the lights or the oven.

Process

Sam Beaney went through multiple iterations of Kano Sense before settling on its final form. Embedded computer vision allows Kano Sense to scan certain home items within its vision to turn them into smart home outputs.

Kano Sense’s approachable look allows it to blend in with the rest of your home.

Beaney envisions multiple looks for Kano Sense, using different types of timber to fit into varied interior spaces.

Using a 4-axis CNC milling technique, Kano Sense’s wooden frame is produced.

Beneath Kano Sense’s one-way mirror lens, embedded computer vision technology allows the smart device to scan home items.

This Samsung short-throw projector merges with Bixby to create a gadget that does it all!

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Bixby has become a household name by now. Practically every home features a virtual assistant or smart device that takes care of things like dimming the lights or searching recipes for dinner. All it takes is the calling of its name for smart devices to jingle awake and assume their position for service. Inspired by features from Samsung’s virtual assistant Bixby, Osay Imarhiagbe has designed Samsung Smart Prism, a smart home accessory that combines a projector with a smart speaker.

The Samsung Smart Prism is coated in a refined matte black finish and maintains a discreet cubic shape that could fit inconspicuously on any tabletop. Compatible with Samsung Galaxy devices, the Smart Prism as designed by Imarhiagbe brings the device’s integrated information like images, audio, text beyond the physical limits of a standard smart home device. By combining a smart home speaker with an ultra-short-throw projector, the Smart Prism is capable of announcing requested information and projecting images like recipes in a queue and perhaps even previously downloaded films. Whenever the Smart Prism has a message to deliver to its user, the projector can launch it onto the wall so even if the audio message gets lost, a physical reminder remains.

While the Smart Prism was designed exclusively with Samsung Galaxy users in mind, the merging of an ultra-short-throw projector with all the perks of a standard virtual assistant is sure to give way to future developments in the smart home devices industry. Designed for portability, the Smart Prism has a compact build and integrated battery perfect for movie nights away from home or for bringing the projector from the living room to the kitchen for dinner with friends or family.

Designer: Osay Imarhiagbe

Coated with a matte-black finish, the Samsung Smart Prism is inconspicuous and adaptive by design.

With an integrated projector, the Samsung Smart Assistant is able to leave physical messages on the wall as reminders to users.

Compatible with Samsung Galaxy devices, The Samsung Smart Prism’s digital experience was designed exclusively for Samsung users.

Combining the perks of virtual assistant Bixby with the convenience of projected messages, the Smart Prism can take care of it all.

The Samsung Smart Prism is perfect for those nights spent cooking new recipes or watching movies with friends or family.

This plug-and-use smart home device is the closest thing to having your personal JARVIS

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I’m having trouble describing what the Inlo is because I’m not sure if there’s really a phrase that can concisely explain exactly what the Inlo does. The Inlo is quite unlike any device I’ve seen before, and the best way to describe it is to reference Iron Man’s JARVIS by saying that the Inlo is quite literally your tech-butler that’s capable of doing everything from helping you find your phone, adjust the thermostat, or switch lights on every time you enter a room and off when you leave. The Inlo functions a lot like an assistant. It recognizes your ‘presence’, communicates with you, understands your needs, and helps make life easier by allowing you to keep track of your stuff. My description so far is still quite vague, so let’s just dive into what exactly the Inlo is, how it works, and why it’s so different from anything we’ve ever seen.

I’m bringing back my butler analogy because it just works. Imagine having a butler in your home. The butler opens doors for you, draws your curtains open when it’s daytime, warms up the bath every morning, lets you know where your keys or phone are kept if you ever misplace them in a hurry, and just makes your life more comfortable by handling the micro-experiences that make living easy. Now it wouldn’t be economical or futuristic to have a real butler do these things for you, which is why we’ve got something like the Inlo. The Inlo is a series of devices that plug into the sockets in your home. Using wireless connections, Inlo communicates with all the Bluetooth and internet-enabled objects around your house, from your phone, to your laptop, tablet, smart bulb, smart speaker, to even your door lock. Its ability to detect and communicate with wireless devices also allows Inlo to track your ‘presence’. If you’ve got a wearable on, you can program Inlo to treat the wearable as an extension of you – if Inlo detects your smartwatch ‘walking into a room’, it assumes it’s you wearing the smartwatch. Plug an Inlo device into every room in your house and you effectively create a network that allows this smart gadget to sense wherever you are in the house, adjusting things accordingly. This could mean having lights switch on when you enter a room, or having music play on the nearest speaker so you could ideally move from the living room to the kitchen and have your music ‘follow you’.

Inlo’s ability to sense your ‘presence’ goes as far as even having it differentiate between you and other members of your household. Without using any cameras (so Inlo never captures any actionable data on you), Inlo can track the presence of people simply by tracking devices they carry. The Inlo app allows you to create a floor-plan of your house and see every single wireless device in its location. This means you could see which room your family members are in, or even where you left your phone. Want to track something that isn’t wireless? Just attach Inlo’s wireless tracker to it and you’re ready. You could put the tracker on your keys, wallet, or even around your pet’s collar to know their whereabouts. Inlo’s network of devices – which they call satellites – can easily track the presence of devices and communicate with them based on how you’ve configured the settings.

This is the part where I talk about why Inlo is so different. Inlo’s versatility and its ability to easily map entire homes and the occupants within makes it much more powerful than Alexa, Google Now, or Siri. You could use Inlo to see which room your keys are kept in, or where your cat’s hiding. Inlo allows you to map your house and easily manage/automate devices within it to a degree that most smart assistants can’t… and the best part yet? The absence of cameras and facial recognition means Inlo can’t really spy on your home. It’s like your butler… obedient, helpful, always around, and fiercely loyal.

Designer: Jon Martin of Inlo

Click Here to Buy Now: $49. Hurry, for a limited time only!

Inlo – World’s First Indoor Positioning System

Inlo’s multi-faceted technology maps your home and can be used to simply keep track of your belongings by always having their location and status available at your fingertips, or to completely automate your life by having smart-lights, -thermostats, and -locks react according to your position in the home.

Map and Track Your Home

Be one of the first people to have an indoor map of your home, with real-time position updates of your favorite belongings, pets, and people.

With Inlo’s software you create a digital map of an indoor site. It’s like a secure GPS for indoors. Its tracking is enabled with Bluetooth.

End to End Encryption on Inlo accounts, secure you against any invasion of privacy. Positions of your objects can only be accessed by you and the people you give permission to.

Inlo works best with Satellites placed in each major room of the site. Inlo gets more and more accurate when you add more Satellites. The more, the better.

Inlo’s plugged-in Satellites work the same way that GPS satellites do. Inlo’s Satellites measure the Bluetooth signals coming from your paired devices and communicate with each other to locate what you’re looking for.

Control your Environment with Inlo Presence

Presence is a new way to interface with your electronics and your Smart Home and pushes the current limits of home automation. Presence does for location what Voice (Alexa and Google) does for speech. Inlo knows who you are, where you are, and where all your devices live. It activates your smart device preferences based on personalized triggers you set up in the Inlo app, under your profile.

Forget to switch off the lights, lock the door, and turn the heating off when you leave home? With Inlo, you can relax knowing that your home will automatically do these things when the house is empty.

Maximize Home Automation

With Inlo, you can now set up your smart device preferences to adjust based on where you’re at in your home and other personalized event triggers. You can create a profile for anyone, and have your home adjust to their settings. If multiple people in the same room have different preferences, Inlo will default to the Site Administrator’s preferences; or, for things like lighting and temperature, Inlo will average the preferences and set the room’s environment accordingly.

Pair all your Bluetooth devices easily for easy device management and tracking.

Inlo works with existing tracking tags (Tile or Chiplo) and makes them even more useful and easy to locate. With Inlo, you see exactly where your tag is located on a map of your home.

Integrate with your Existing Home System

Create multiple sites and link multiple profiles to a site.

Be Social with Inlo

When you’ve lost a Bluetooth device, others can scan it using the Inlo app and easily see the account it is tied to and return it to you. “The Crowd” is a network of Inlo users using the features from the free software.

Click Here to Buy Now: $49. Hurry, for a limited time only!

This smart humidifier merges ultrasound and evaporative technology to keep you safe at home

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Evapolar is known for making the award-winning product evaCHILL, a portable planet-friendly air conditioner that was a prelude to their next potentially award-winning design – the evaWAVE! We get excited when we see Vitaliy Tarasov collaborate with Evapolar because it results in innovative product designs that elevate the breathing experience and do not harm our environment as opposed to traditional air conditioners, purifiers, or coolers.

The evaWAVE is the world’s most advanced evaporative humidifier and aroma diffuser. Why? Because it combines the powerful functionality of ultrasonic humidifiers with the health benefits of evaporative humidifiers into one smart appliance that also serves as an aroma diffuser. Ultrasonic humidifiers are high-performing but tend to leave pools and white dust around. Evaporative humidifiers on the other hand provide natural humidification but their organic evaporative pads allow bacteria to flourish which becomes super unhealthy for the air you breathe. The aim was to create an appliance that perfectly combines the efficiency and technology of the two types of humidifiers into one product which is safer, cleaner, healthier, and visually appealing. It not only manages your home’s humidity to keep it at a healthy level but also doubles up as an aroma diffuser so the air smells as good as it is for your health. The form is compact, unobtrusive, and has smooth curves. The user interface is minimal and clean which can also be controlled using their integrated Evapolar mobile app for all smart home platforms. A subtle yet thoughtful detail is the LED light-up base that lets the user switch colors and function as a night lamp. It also includes features like aroma control, wake up mode, a built-in speaker, and an ionic silver + UV lamp.

The evaWAVE comes with Evapolar’s trademark breeze technology (EvaBreeze) which has proven to be a success in their other products. “Its effect is achieved due to a nanostructure that enables outstanding absorbing capacity, combining both hydrophilic and hydrophobic effects. This allows the material to efficiently absorb water and easily take it into the air. There is great evaporation from a small surface. EvaBreeze is totally safe and is approved by international certificates,” says the design and development team about what makes evaWAVE a safer choice for your environment.

Designer: Vitaliy Tarasov for Evapolar

evapolar2

evapolar

Your leftover food powers this smart WFH desk!

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Furniture ideas are really evolving during quarantine and I am loving that a table brings a lot more to the table than being a table. Never did I think I would come across a clock that was also a table but the world of design always surprises us! Functional furniture is an essential as our lifestyles become more flexible, especially after the pandemic that has taught us to optimize our resources to serve more than one purpose – just like this conceptual work station.

This table is called a Clock and I want you to keep that in mind for the rest of this story. Clock was designed to be compact and fit in the growing trend of smaller living spaces. The designer wanted to create something that seamlessly blended into our workdays (especially when working from home!) without disrupting our office hours or eating habits. The hybrid station converts food waste into energy to power itself wirelessly but also includes the systems to be plugged into a wall if needed. It is an innovative product that combines technology and functionality to sustainably manage waste and encourage more people to shift to natural/renewable energy sources.

When you aren’t working, simply slide the parts back and close the product into a slim bench. In its closed state, only the power icon and energy levels are visible, simply tap the power icon to light up the panel. The smart furniture appliance also has defined heating and cooling areas that are touch-controlled. You can sync your phone with Clock to receive all the important updates and statistics about your hi-tech table. This is an award-winning project that gives us a glimpse of a better future where multi-functional, sustainably powered, and aesthetically sleek products give us the flexible life we crave.

Designer: Yeg Design Studio

This article was sent to us using the ‘Submit A Design’ feature.

We encourage designers/students/studios to send in their projects to be featured on Yanko Design!

This smart door handle solves 4 issues of its predecessors

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Smart homes are no longer a thing of the future, it all started with TVs and mobile phones but now most appliances in our home have an ‘above average IQ’. One of the first few converts were lights, refrigerators, and thermostats, we also have a few smart handles and locks but they are just not ready to take the SATs (I can’t be the only one who finds these entertaining!). They are often overlooked when we think of smart appliances but this conceptual handle is here to ‘unlock’ some new levels in the smart home game.

The Handle solves a lot of the issues that come with the current smart locks in the market. The invisible tech feature has a human body sensor so the backlight in the handle will light up when you approach thus making it easier for you to touch the fingerprint identification on the backside of the product. The frontside has a laser microvia touch keypad which lights up subtly when needed and literally looks like someone has imprinted the handle with characters using a fine-tip glow pen. You can set a number password, icon password or pattern password on this keypad.

The indoor handle (when you are inside the room) has an unlock key to open the door and an ergonomic toggle switch you can use to lock the door. Unlike most smart handles and locks, the Handle is not black or bulky, it is slim, very sleek and has a modern yet minimalist design that makes it merge with any interior environment. The handle is here to open the door to a brighter future of smart homes.

Designers: Wayne Lu and Wenjie Zheng

This air quality monitor tracks 5 factors and recommends changes for health

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People are now more self-aware than ever about hygiene. In many ways, the global pandemic has served as a wake-up call for all us to make necessary changes in our lifestyle for better health. From simple habits to gadgets like air purifiers, these changes should stick in our daily routines even after the situation calms down. The first step to better health always starts at home and we usually don’t think about things like the air quality surrounding us unless there is a crisis. Devices like the Awair air quality tracker are here to make our homes a little more pure and safe.

We may not know this but, indoor air can be 5x more polluted than outside as we are constantly exposed to factors like paint, furniture, carpet, air fresheners, toys, and more. The air quality can have a major influence on allergies, asthma, focus, sleep quality, skin health, and overall well-being apart from just physical health. The Awair 2nd-edition air quality monitor can track it all for you and even give you personalized recommendations to improve the air in your space. The smart device records the 5 most important factors that affect your health like fine dust, chemicals, CO2, humidity, and temperature to give you a report straight on your phone with changes we can make to up the quality.

The Awair Score is a color-coded scale that lets you know the quality of your air and what changes you must make to improve it. The scale is from 0 to 100 with 0 being poor air quality and 100 being very healthy. It is compatible with smart home devices like Ecobee, Google Home and Alexa so it seamlessly integrates itself in your ecosystem. You can control it via voice commands or an app on your phone when you aren’t home. Even the physical monitor is designed to match all interior styles with its wood frame and subtle silver interface. If you wouldn’t drink dirty water then why breathe dirty air?

Designer: Awair

Click Here to Buy Now!