What will the home of the future be able to do?

The technology inside our homes will be so advanced it could even give us health warnings – based on smart toilets analysing our waste.

That’s according to experts who have painted a picture of an average house just 50 years into the future.

To mark the start of Smart Home Week, which runs 21st May to 27th May, supported by leading brands including, Amazon, ebay, Google, Philips Hue, Ring, Samsung SmartThings, tado° and Yale, futurist Tom Cheesewright said: “Adding an internet connection to an appliance probably adds a cost of about 50p to the materials. Some of these things may have a chip in already that just hasn’t been activated.”

One of the biggest challenges facing tech developers is how to keep smart devices powered – now, they either need rechargeable batteries or a connection to the mains. However, Cheesewright believes within a decade we could see that improving, as battery technology makes incredible leaps forward.

He said: “Three other waves of tech will have been completed in 50 years. Wave one is that the need to have a battery, or a mains power connection, will have gone away. We’ll have extraordinarily small, high capacity batteries, charged by picking up ambient radio waves. It won’t be just appliances that are smart in your home, just about everything you buy will be smart in 50 years. Clothes, shoes, your toilet roll – literally everything.”

Cheesewright was speaking after a survey of 2,000 homeowners found 43% of Britons currently have some form of smart technology in their homes. And 63% envisage themselves adding to their stock of smart devices over the next 12 months.

Although the top concern among homeowners at the moment would be the security of their smart devices, if their entire house depended on them. The next big shift in home technology is what Cheesewright calls ‘The new Personal Digital Assistant,’ personal AI tailored to each unique user.

He said: “Imagine a voice assistant, owned by you and operating on your behalf. One that knows you so well because it picks up on your health data, it picks up on your social graph, it knows where you’ve been – it literally knows you inside out.

“The third wave is augmented or mixed reality, which will also tie in to this. I think the next natural interface is mixed reality like the movie Ready Player One, where people spend most of their time in a Virtual Reality world – probably lived in ten hours a day.

“For the most part, things will just happen around you automatically, through a combination of your biometrics and possession of your devices. As you come home from work, your home knows you’re approaching.

“The temperature is set appropriately, it knows your emotional state, it knows how hungry you are and when you last ate, it knows what your plans for the evening are, it knows what TV shows you like and whether new episodes have been released.

“It will even know what you’ve got in the fridge and will suggest recipes based on your ingredients, perhaps even switching on the oven to pre-heat it for you.

The home of the future could even save our lives, according to Cheesewright, who added: “In the future your toilet will be your doctor – one of the really good ways to understand what’s going on inside your body is to analyse your waste, basically. So, I can absolutely see smart toilets being a thing.”

The study found nine percent of the average Briton’s home is ‘smart’ – although 65% say they find new tech ‘overwhelming’. With this in mind, Smart Home Week is designed to provide advice and information on the range of smart products available.

By partnering with some of the largest names in the smart technology industry, Smart Home Week offers advice and will help cut through the jargon, making the smart home more accessible, as well showcasing the best and latest developments in the smart home world.

During Smart Home Week, official supporters will be hosting a wide range of competitions and giveaways as well as sharing discounts and offers.