Hii technology

As a consumer electronics manufacturer National Panasonic is looking at markets where it can integrate its three product domains; digital and network technologies, healthcare and welfare, and environment. One of the areas it has identified is housebuilding and to bring its skills in systems integration into play National Panasonic has built a prototype.

The Home Information Infrastructure (HII) demonstration house in Tokyo is designed to showcase the company’s latest technologies. The house has two separate networks linked together through a central server that acts as a gateway for information coming to or going from the home. One network looks after building control and the other multimedia applications.

The building control network uses a variety of methods to transfer information and these include dedicated wiring, power-line transmission and wireless technologies using the Echonet transmission protocol. Multimedia transmission relies on a dedicated fibreoptic AVC media network. This is what the technology does:

Entrance

This is equipped with a networked intercom system. Visitors can be spoken to and viewed from a terminal in each room. Alternatively, if no one is at home, or the occupant does not wish to respond, a video message can be left or transmitted to a computer at a remote location.

Living rooms

All the living rooms feature Home Information Infrastructure ports allowing seamless communication between the server, other computers and broadcasts so that the television can act as a display for a computer or receive video on demand through satellite, cable or the internet.

Kitchen

A terminal in the kitchen gives data on food and is linked to the refrigerator for inventory control and to external stores for ordering the groceries. The kitchen is also equipped with a networked microwave that can read cooking instructions from the server and prepare food accordingly.

Bedroom and bathroom

Both bedroom and bathroom are aimed at the health market. The bedroom is equipped with a health monitoring kit that can measure temperature, blood pressure, heart rate and blood sugar levels. There is also an electronic scope to allow a certain amount of on-line diagnosis by a doctor.

The bathroom uses a number of sensors in the toilet to measure weight, body fat ratio and urinary sugar levels. These devices can store the recorded information on the home server or transmit it to a doctor if required.

Heat and power

On the roof of the house is a small additional generator which uses a polymer-based fuel cell to produce heat and electricity using hydrogen drawn from the town gas supply. This can also be adapted for other fuels. The house’s boiler uses a variety of environmental technologies to create a small, clean, efficient integrated heat and power system suitable for a single property.

This may sound like science fiction, but the technology is almost ready to be marketed. Selected items from the house are set to go on sale in Japan next year.