Social networking meets home appliances

I am a fan of "This Old House" and on a recent show they were talking about the latest trend in hot water heaters - tankless water heater. They are apparently very popular in Europe and are making inroads here. The idea is that instead of heating water and storing it in a tank, you install a high-capacity heater "inline" and it runs on-demand only. Supposedly, you can have 3 showers running at the same time and it will meet the demand. Sounds very cool. But that's not all - and this gets even more fascinating. When you open the faucet, the heater senses the pressure change and comes on, but you have to wait until all the cold water that is sitting between the heater and your faucet runs out before you get the hot water. No big deal, the same thing happens in system with tanks. But with this system, it can be addressed! Imagine installing a recirculating pump between the tankless heater and the faucets. It can draw that cold water and pre-heat it. he question is - when do you turn on the recirc pump? Why, put a motion detector in the bathroom, of course!!! It sees you come in, assumes (rightly so in most cases) that you will be needing some hot water, and turns on the recirc pump. That, in turn, gets the water heater going and when you open a faucet in a little while - viola! - hot water.

Why am I so excited about it besides the fact that it is simply cool? Well, a few years back I would say that it is an example of a context-aware system. It can perform a function based on an generic input (no motion detector or demand from a faucet without an associated sensor), but it can also perform that function based on some specific information - a person walked into a restroom. Obviously, the range of contextual information can increase and so can the usefulness and efficiency of the system.

These days, this invokes a social networking analogy. Imagine that the motion sensor is Tweeting about your presence. Or better yet, imagine that this sensor is just one element in a larger network of devices that are gathering the stream of information you generate as you interact with your real as well as virtual environment! And this information can be consumed as a feed by your friends, by various devices around you, and processed to find interesting related streams generated by others, and so on...

The cool tankless water heater plus a recirc pump setup is a good illustration of an entire ecosystem of "social" interactions, real and virtual.