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Date: October 7, 2004

Presenter: Jay Froscheiser, VP of Product Development

Affiliation: DTN - www.dtn.com

The guest speaker for this meeting was Jay Froscheiser, VP of Product Development at DTN discussing "Home Automation - Current Products and Uses." In addition to his duties at DTN, Mr. Froscheiser provides ITC with membership database and email services. The "Home Automation" experience comes from his own home computer server with various software programs connected to peripheral equipment, such cameras, weather sensors, and motion detectors. This will be a practical demonstration with ITC members using the computers in the training room to access the remote server.

Home Automation has come a long ways from the "Smart Home" concepts of the 80's and 90's when connecting remotely to a home network was generally available only via dial-up modem. Early uses included remote temperature and alarm monitoring, but video was not practical due to bandwidth constraints.

The Home Automation uses that will be demonstrated or reviewed will include:

  • Text To Speech
  • Text to speech email alerts (have new email message read to you)
  • Voice Recognition/Voice Command
  • Computer based Voice Mail with Email alert and online message retrieval
  • An electronic Shopping List
  • Voice/Remote control of whole house audio/music
  • Internet Video Monitoring (Live Demo of My House Video)
  • Automated Weather reporting (have your computer tell you today's forecast when you wake up)
  • TV Show Reminders and Automation (ask the computer to tell you what is on your favorite channels)
  • Automated Lighting (turn lights on and off based on an unlimited number of events/factors)
  • Motion Sensor Driven events (do things based on motion in your house)
One interesting fact is that the software for the demonstration is the same software being showcased in the new Fox show Renovate My Family. In this show, they tear down a house and rebuild it in 7 days. As part of the rebuild, all houses are "SmartHome Enabled" using the same software demonstrated during the meeting.


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