Japan introduces smart house project

Yokohama city hosts one of the largest numbers of manufacturing industries in Japan. There are around 6,000 manufacturing companies and 3,000 IT companies in the city. It aims to "create new business models" and "contribute to solving social issues" by "supporting the challenges that small companies encounter".

There is a "Future House Project" introducing IoT technology in a residential building. Yokohama City and five companies are collaborating in this project.

Trailer-type houses have furniture with a variety of approximately 15 IoT technologies. By actually having people live here, the data of the indoor environment is obtained from temperature, humidity, and illumination. Vital data on the weight, blood pressure, sleep time, and life activity line are also recorded in cloud servers.

"These are all IoT lightings. You can adjust the color or turn off the light from your Smartphone. The washstand will automatically measure the weight while standing in front of the sink. The mirror displays health data such as weight, sleep time and calories etc. Just by standing there you can always keep track of the information of your current condition every day," said Ken Yamashita, NTT DOCOMO.

"We hope to create an environment where artificial intelligence (AI) can automatically control these sensors and other IoT appliances in the future. Through actually having people live in this house, we are currently demonstrating an experiment by analysing numbers of information from their actual everyday life," he added.

In Yokohama City, the increase of the elderly living alone is becoming a problem. It is necessary to create an environment to maintain the health of these elderly people and provide a comfortable and reassuring lifestyle.

"Not only the population of Yokohama is aging, but the entire population of Japan is. We estimate the number of elderly people to increase to 40 percent of the population by 2040. Yokohama city proudly continues to promote this "Future House Project" and contributes to comfortable housing for the people," said Ken Tateishi, Yokohama City.

The accumulated data of the Future House Project will be useful for the future development of Yokohama City.