For Apple, the house of the future can recognize you by the beating of your heart

In the near future, Apple's engineers are imagining a smart home that will not only manage your home automation devices, but also identify you and keep track of your heart rate. In any case, this is the vision outlined in a patent filed by the firm last year and published this week. If the document is substantial enough, it lays the foundations for a home that is capable of communicating with connected devices or objects and distinguishing between different users.

A future Heart ID for Apple's smart home?

According to Apple, its future system will be able to find out whether a person is (or is not) a resident of the house by studying the unique way their heart beats. To do this, it could use a millimetre-wave sensor. This same technique also allows the monitoring of breathing to identify each individual even better. For Apple, the purpose of this Heart ID is to restrict access to certain home automation functions to defined individuals, for example, parents.

The house could also identify inanimate objects.

The other point from the future raised by Apple's patent is the ability of its connected home to distinguish one inanimate object from another. This time, the goal is to improve communication between the different devices in the home in order to anticipate the desires of its occupants. The example mentioned by Apple in its patent is therefore fascinating. It is a movie night. So when the smart home system hears a ringing tone from the kitchen, it will recognize that it is the microwave's timer. The smart home system will then attach this information to the event in the occupants' diary ("movie night") and guess that it's popcorn. As a result, it will conclude that the evening is about to begin, since the popcorn is ready. It will then turn on the TV screen, turn down the lights and adjust the audio system. In Apple's future, the house knows a lot more about us than it does with its current HomeKit platform. But do we really want to? In any case, it's just an idea that could stay that way, even if it's patented.