The lecture “Smart Homes Trends”, given by Dan Costa (Editor-in-Chief of PCMag), took place this Thursday at Salão Nobre and was organised within the American Corners Portugal.

Dan Costa noted that nowadays smart technology is part of our daily life. According to the journalist, advances in speech recognition technology are one of the things that has contributed the most to the dissemination of smart homes, “these advances make us rethink the way we look at technology itself”.

According to Costa, one of the areas that has been given more prominence in the United States is smart technology for agriculture and gardening, with progressive advances in automatic watering and illumination. The technology for the elderly is another area that is rapidly evolving. It provides an improvement in the quality of life and allows to reduce costs with nursing homes.

The Editor-in-Chief of PC Magazine talked about some doubts regarding the so-called smart appliances, partly due to their high costs. Costa also referred some examples of bad technology: an automatic dog feeder that didn’t work out, a bottle of water that indicates the amount of water we need to drink each day or a transparent box that tells us how many eggs we have got in the refrigerator.

According to Dan Costa, the popularity of smart trend is mainly due to security reasons and energy efficiency. The journalist ended his lecture noting that on one hand people want to invest in this type of technology to feel more safe, however, on the other hand this safety, or in this case the lack of it, raises serious questions to this brave new world.