Happy Chinese New Year to all my Chinese friends. It's been a roller coaster ride on the world economics. We have the oil plunge, the commodities falling, the currencies being volatile, and even the weather is changing. But thank God that all of us have gone through all those challenges and still barely surviving.
During this festive season, many of us would go visiting relatives and friends. We would do a lot of catching up on everyone's activities. But some of us would rather sleep at their own comfort home and have a nice holiday, and I'm one of them. So during the day when I was going to take an afternoon nap, something struck into my mind: is there any way for a bedroom to be smart and energy efficient? Certainly there are some ideas and we are going to share some in today's topic.
How To Design A Smart Bedroom
A smart bedroom is a room that incorporates advanced automation systems to provide the inhabitants with sophisticated monitoring and control over the rooms function. Lightings, temperature, multimedia, security, window and door operations as well as other functions can be controlled with the technology available in the market. So, I'll share with a few ideas that can be used to design a smart bedroom.
Plasma Nightlight: it's plugged directly into power supply and switches on to reveal a web of crawling neon beams in red and purple that gravitate towards fingertips. The internal currents are then guided to the fingertips and dramatically twist and undulate under the bulb's interior. It's not only consume less energy but it also makes the bedroom looks nicer.
Smart Mattress: did you know there's a mattress that monitors your body and adjust its firmness to ensure every part of your body remains perfectly supported during sleep? This mattress is embedded with sensors to detect breathing and heart rate, accelerometers to track sleep patterns and microphones to hear your snoring.
Smart Throw Projector: have you ever wondered that you can watch movie, making video conference or even playing interactive games in your bedroom? The smart throw projector not only lets you to project images onto the wall, but multi-touch interactivity, you can toss, rotate or zoom by using natural touch gestures.
Smart Mood Lighting: this lighting is dimmable, energy saving up to 88% from the conventional light bulbs and can be set based on multiple functions such as relaxing, music, movie, etc. This light can be controlled through smartphone or tablet PC.
Smart Thermostat: this thermostat turns itself down automatically when nobody is in the bedroom. It learns about the temperature that the user likes and programs itself automatically. It can be connected to Wi-Fi to control the temperature from your phone, tablet or laptop.
Smart Ceiling Fan: my previous blog post discussed about this, so I'll just summarize it. This fan generates more airflow by using lesser energy. It also has temperature sensor which adjust the fan speed according to the room temperature. Some of them even come with a built-in LED for lighting purposes.
Smart Alarm Clock: last but not least is the alarm clock. This gadget actually forces you out and far away from bed and to the remotely located "Defuse Panel" where you'll have to enter code the turn off the alarm. By doing so, your brain needs to figure out the right code, which will ultimately put you in the Awake mode. Not really smart but at least it does it job efficiently.
Pros & Cons
Pros
Saving Space
Saving Space
Instead of having an alarm clock or some sort of dashboard that tells you the weather, you can just keep your phone on your bedside. We're long past the days where our phones are only used as phones. You can replace a clock, a radio, and music players all with your phone, given you have a smartphone.
Entertainment
The couple hours we have before retiring for the night are often spent doing leisure activities to unwind from the day, like reading or catching up on TV shows, as well as playing some casual games and chatting with friends. Keeping tech in your bedroom, like a laptop or a tablet, provides entertainment before you turn in.
Working
Having a desktop setup in the bedroom can be convenient when it comes to working late, especially if you have roommates and don't want to disturb them. If you're one who tends to work late into the night or likes to do personal projects at early or late hours, having your computer setup readily accessible can improve your work efficiency.
Cons
Lack of Interactivity with Others
If there's only one TV in your apartment and you have roommates, we find that the better option is to keep the TV in a common area versus keeping it in your bedroom. Keeping the TV in a common area encourages interaction with others, whether you have roommates or have people over. We wouldn't encourage holing yourself up in your room with the TV always on.
Disturbing Your Significant Other
If you have a significant other that you share your space with, we'd definitely encourage keeping less tech in the bedroom if possible, A desktop setup could be especially disruptive if you work late into the night when the other person is trying to sleep. And again, it's better to engage more human interaction after hours than to continue playing with tech.
Not Unplugging
As much as we love all our tech, we also strongly believe in having breaks from time to time. Given the way we are hyper connected to our email and text messages and all the apps we use on a daily basis, it's always good to exercise some "tech downtime." This is the main con we see with filling your bedroom with tech — there just isn't much of a break from it.
Is it Worth The Investment?
As you can see, technology in the bedroom has its pros and cons. So if you are going to use a digital device, make sure it's the one that promotes sleep, rather than stop it in its tracks.
Debates had surfaced in the past few years as to whether smart bedroom technology necessary, useful or practical but companies continue researching and producing these technologies. As these devices evolve and learn to communicate with each other, opinions may differ in the future.
In conclusion, we feel like it's inevitable to have some tech in the bedroom but it's best to keep the big stuff like TVs and desktop computers elsewhere. However all this is contingent on each individual's living lifestyle as well.
So how much tech do you keep in your bedroom?
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