Home is where the heart is. This is said by people all over the world every day. This the place that families and friends gather to visit, to care, to rest and that we take great care of. The smart home of the future will be the place that cares of us.
The Yonezawa office Arcadia Campus in Japan, which was offered to the city of Yonezawa by the government for free, is home to the “Smart Mirai (future) house”. This smart house was built for verifications of organic electronics.
The Organic Electronics applications apply to the design, synthesis, characterization of organic (carbon based) small molecules or polymers that have properties such as conductivity. One of the great benefits of organic electronics is the low cost, and this is a very important factor when considering the cost of preparing green homes for the future generations of our Earth.
The home itself was co-developed and designed by Yamazata University’s Research Center or Organic Electronics (ROEL) along with the Innovation Center for Organic Electronics (INOEL).
This home has a 230m² total floor area within a two story, wood and partially concrete-reinforced building. The homes windows are ‘power generating windows’, made of a thin solar cell technology. The walls and ceiling of the home are covered in ‘wallpaper displays’ which allow for life-size teleconferencing, remote medical diagnosis, and more.
The bedrooms of the home are equipped with OLED lamps, organic biosensors for measuring the vital signs of the people sleeping, including heart rates, blood pressure and breathing rates.
The Organic Light Emitting Diode lamps, which are emissive layers which respond to electric current by producing light. This technology differs from bulbs because OLED displays can be very large, flat, colored, flexible, color-tunable, and are far from the traditional small spectrum of the traditional bulb.
The home of the future was once something seen in movies and cartoons, out of our reach and unattainable. It is no longer just a dream to have a home that we communicate with. From smart televisions, to refrigerators that speak, and to homes that monitor our environment for us, the future is upon us – and it is SMART.
