This Guest Post is by Eliot Stein. Eliot works for SmartThings and was inspired by the post I wrote back in January about the Conscious Home and my poor parenting abilities. He wrote this post for SmartThings’ blog and has graciously allowed me to repost here on Shoegnome. I’ll add a thought or two at the end…

One of the inevitable side-effects of Google’s recent $3.2 billion cash acquisition of Nest is that people who had never before heard about the Internet of Things are starting to pay attention.

I recently came across a thought-provoking post by Jared Banks who runs a great architecture blog called Shoegnome.com. In it, he daydreams about a futuristic utopia in which a fully conscious home could somehow feed him information about his kids and their patterns to make him a better parent. He poses a hypothetical “wouldn’t it be cool if”-type question to other architects about what it would be like to not just design a space for families to physically exist in, but a multi-dimensional experience for families to live in.

It’s a blueprint. An outline of things to come. And it suggests that “this imagined future is still a few years away“—which might be true, if you’re Google.

What’s interesting about much of the mainstream media’s analysis of Google’s acquisition of Nest is that it tends to focus on what might be possible in a Google-powered smart home of the future, while rarely focusing on what is possible in a smart home today. Charting a roadmap without first understanding your coordinates is a curious practice, so we felt we owed it to people like Jared to describe how the conscious home of today can make you a better parent.

Here are a few easy ways that SmartThings can help parents gain peace of mind, teach good habits, and even sleep more. To get started, all you need is a $99 Hub and about 15 minutes to customize your conscious home.

– Know when your kids come and go from home

By placing a SmartSense Presence sensor in your child’s backpack, you can get a push or text message each time he or she comes home. You can also choose to only receive messages when your son or daughter doesn’t come home when they’re supposed to. (Check out one of our great user stories about this here.)

– Prevent kids from accessing liquor cabinets, gun cases, cleaning supply cabinets, and other dangerous or off-limits areas of your home

Simply place a SmartSense Multi sensor or compatible open/close sensor on a cabinet, drawer, or case and get an immediate alert on your phone if your child is accessing off-limit areas. To deter your child or daughter from tampering further with these dangerous or off-limit areas, you can also install a flashing strobe alarm to drive home the message.

– Teach your children good habits… and ensure that their bad habits don’t cause higher electrical bills—or worse

There are lots of ways to use SmartThings to teach your children good habits, but our favorite is by using the “Once a Day” feature of our iOS and Android apps. This can turn on a light or flash a Philips hue bulb to remind your kids to do important things each day if they haven’t done them—ie: walk the dog, take their vitamins, start their schoolwork, etc.

By monitoring and controlling any pluggable or hard-wired light or electronic through the “Power Allowance” feature of our iOS and Android apps, parents will no longer need to worry about whether kids have shut off different lights or small electronics that kids regularly use. Simply set a minute limit in our app and the lamp, light, or electronic that your kid uses will automatically shut off at that time.

And if your child tends to leave the faucet or bathtub dripping, place a SmartSense Moisture sensor in areas prone to water to prevent a small leak from causing a costly flood.

– Allow parents to sleep more

You no longer need to wake up to turn on lights and walk your son or daughter to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Easily trigger any nightlight, hall light, or bathroom light to automatically turn on when there’s motion detected. And once motion has stopped being detected for a few minutes, the lights will automatically turn off.

And for those with babies or toddlers, you can even plug in a musical mobile and set it to start playing for a set amount of time to soothe your tyke back to sleep if he or she wakes up and starts jostling around in the middle of the night.

Okay, Jared here.

Pretty cool, huh? Did you spend the time to watch the videos? Yeah I know it’s marketing, but do it. They all give a great sense of what is possible now, and that first one is hilarious. I have more to say about the videos and Eliot’s post, but I’m still brain dead from my move from the East coast to the West coast (today is my first official day of work in Seattle). I want to write a follow up post to both this article and my original post. I need to look into what SmartThings can do and apply some of my architect-energy to unravel what else their tools could do today.

If you don’t want to wait for my post (which will be titled “How I can make the Conscious Home a Better Parent“), how about you do some research and write the post for me? That’d be cool. And then it’d come faster. I love all my guest bloggers and want more! You know what to do.

What can we envision that takes what’s available now and turns it into something even more magical? As a clue watch the last video and think about all the great Sci-Fi movies you love. How can we make those fantasy responsive environments real today? Let’s do some reverse engineering, because architects can help create the Conscious Built Environment or abdicate even more value. Your choice.

Do you have thoughts about the future of our built environment? Want to share your ideas as a guest blogger? E-mail me! Subscribe to my blog to read more about the tricky world of being an Architect in the 21st century: Shoegnome on Facebook, Twitter, and RSS feed. And now you can join the LinkedIN group too. Oh and sorry for any weird typos on my part. I am super sleepy from the time change…