Monitor Your Home’s Energy Use on the iPhone with Current State
By David Walker |
February 14th, 2008
Comments (0)
The iPhone is set to explode as a multi-purpose device. It’s gorgeous touchscreen, growing popularity and OS X based operating system are setting it up to be so much more than just a great phone or media player. Even though home energy monitoring is not something you’d normally get excited about, the “Current State” concept - as reported by Automated Home - could be the project to generate excitement over this concept, by using a device like the iPhone to help users easily and intuitively monitor usage.
The Current State system - which is still a concept at this point - would work by putting software on your mobile phone that communicates with plug-ends scattered around your house to monitor and control electricity usage. From there, the software would monitor your actual electricity usage in each room, showing you real-time kilowatt hours as well as what that power is costing you. The graphic interface gives you an idea of whether your power consumption is high, average or low. The full details of the concept, spelled out at The Greener Grass, give you a good idea of what the slick interface would look like and what kind of information would be intuitively brought to your attention.
The concept here is great, and the idea of using the iPhone as part of the monitoring is even better. These are the types of solutions that bring creative uses to the iPhone platform while also pushing a worthwhile endeavor, such as energy monitoring. Truly, the connected home is better served when it is not just simply connected, but is also efficiently managed. Let’s hope the “Current State” concept moves from dream to reality.
Greg Wishart – 4 hours 19 minutes ago