Canadian Telecom to Showcase Smart Home Concept at PNE

Canadian telecom Telus is preparing to show off a range of smart home technologies at this year’s Pacific National Exhibition in Vancouver, BC.

Together with partners IBM, Nokia, Samsung, and Withings, Telus put together a smart home demo called the Future Home, which will showcase emerging technologies that could one day be commonplace in connected homes. The demo will feature a ‘smart cooktop’ that can guide a resident through a recipe, for example, and ‘digital art’ that can dramatically change the appearance of a wall based on the resident’s mood.

The Future Home will also be a showcase for biometric technologies. Its door will be unlocked via facial recognition, for example, while ‘home health monitors’ will let residents easily share health information with medical professionals. Meanwhile, ‘connected sensors and cameras’ will let residents track their children and pets remotely via smartphone.

Telus’ Future Home demo offers an example of the growing excitement over emerging connected technologies associated with the Internet of Things and the smart home of the future, with major IT companies already investing in smart home AI assistant systems and consumers optimistic about the benefits. For its part, Telus itself isn’t developing these technologies directly, but as a major telecom it will play an important role in establishing the infrastructure to support them, and to that end has announced plans to spend a billion dollars on connecting Vancouver houses and buildings to its high-speed PureFibre network.

The PNE opens August 20th and runs until September 5th.