CTIA Fall 2011: LG’s Smart Home Concept Connects Your Appliances (Video)

Last week at the CTIA fall show in San Diego, California, machine-to-machine, otherwise known as M2M, made a big splash as device vendors, manufacturers, carriers, and partners look forward to the future to envision a connected and inter-connected world beyond smartphones. At the LG booth, the smartphone manufacturer showed off some concepts for the connected smart home that extends beyond while at the same time leveraging the convergence power of smartphones today. With its LG Smart Home, the company demonstrated a refrigerator, laundry machine, and connected vacuum cleaner that can tap into the Internet, synchronize with your phone, and in the process, hopefully, simplify your life.

Essentially, what makes your current smartphone ‘smart’ is its ability to connect to the wealth of information, content, and resources on the worldwide web. LG is hoping to take the same logic and package it into the company’s appliances and use LG smartphones, like the LG Thrill 4G (Optimus 3D) to control these appliances.

For example, with the LG refrigerator, the company will allow your fridge to know what’s being stored inside, when content will expire, and will generate quick and easy recipes for you based on what you have. When you’re at a grocery store, you can connect with the LG smart refrigerator from your LG smartphone and find out what needs replenishing and a grocery list will be generated.

With the smart laundry machine, a smart diagnostic tool will generate an audible code. Users can place the microphone on their LG smartphone up to the washer/dryer combo and the phone will dial into the service center and send the audible code to the technician, which gets de-coded and will tell your service representative exactly what’s going on inside the system without the user ever even needing to explain what’s happening.

And if you love automated vacuum cleaners, like the rival Roomba system, then the LG smart vac will take things up a step further. The smart vacuum can be fully autonomous, like Roomba, or you can use it for surveillance. When you connect an LG smartphone to your network, you can control the LG smart vac as you would a radio control car toy. With front mounted camera on the topside of the vacuum, you can survey what’s going on around your phone from the comfort of your sofa.

The CTIA Smart Home demo is an extension of what LG had announced earlier in the year at CES with the Thinq appliances.