Home watchers of the future will need to be tech savvy

What eMerge Americas can teach us about the future of home watching

Lesson #2 of 3: home watchers will need to be tech savvy

More and more technologies are being introduced, almost daily it seems, to let homeowners control and monitor their homes while they’re not there. This puts the worlds of the business-as-usual home watcher and the Internet-connected home on a collision course. It is one of the inexorable outcomes of eMerge America’s all-encompassing message “Everything is going to be disrupted”.

Security, lighting, water, temperature and flooding are just a few of the home parameters that can now be monitored with sensors and cameras. The logical question arises, “With all this remote surveillance and monitoring, who needs home watchers?” The answer: homeowners will need a new kind of home watcher.

All these surveillance and monitoring devices need to be connected to the Internet somehow, most likely through the home’s Internet router. If anything happens to the router, the whole system comes to a grinding halt. That means that the homeowner who is hundreds, if not thousands of miles away, will have to rely on a new breed of tech savvy home watcher. These tech savvy home watchers are going to have to be well versed in re-setting routers, and making sure all the devices are reconnecting correctly, with no IP address conflicts or other issues. And if those issues do arise, the home watcher is going to have to know how to resolve those too.