Domestic technology is the incorporation of

applied science Applied science is the application of the scientific method and scientific knowledge to attain practical goals. It includes a broad range of disciplines, such as engineering and medicine. Applied science is often contrasted with basic science, ...

into the home. There are multiple aspects of domestic technology. On one level, there are

home appliance A home appliance, also referred to as a domestic appliance, an electric appliance or a household appliance, is a machine which assists in household functions such as cooking, cleaning and food preservation. The domestic application attached to ...

home automation Home automation or domotics is building automation for a home. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It may also include home security such ...

and other devices commonly used in the home, such as

clothes dryer A clothes dryer (tumble dryer, drying machine, drying device, or simply dryer) is a powered Home appliance, household appliance that is used to remove moisture from a load of clothing, bedding and other textiles, usually after they are washed in ...

s and

washing machine A washing machine (laundry machine, clothes washer, washer, or simply wash) is a machine designed to laundry, launder clothing. The term is mostly applied to machines that use water. Other ways of doing laundry include dry cleaning (which uses ...

s. On another level, domestic technology recognizes the use of applied science to construct homes to achieve a particular goal, such as energy efficiency or self-sufficiency. For more information, read about self-sufficient homes. It has been claimed that domestic technology has led to decreases in the time people spend on household work, although the factual basis of this claim is disputed.

Types of domestic technology

Many technologies are now routinely used around the home. For example, microwave ovens and washing machines, among others.

Cleaning equipment

Broom A broom (also known as a broomstick) is a cleaning tool, consisting of usually stiff fibers (often made of materials such as plastic, hair, or corn husks) attached to, and roughly parallel to, a cylindrical handle, the broomstick. It is thus a ...

* Mop *

Sink A sink (also known as ''basin'' in the UK) is a bowl-shaped plumbing fixture for washing hands, dishwashing, and other purposes. Sinks have a tap (faucet) that supplies hot and cold water and may include a spray feature to be used for fas ...

Shower A shower is a place in which a person bathes under a spray of typically warm or hot water. Indoors, there is a drain in the floor. Most showers are set up to have adjustable temperature, spray pressure and showerhead nozzle angle. The si ...

Bath Bath may refer to: * Bathing, immersion in a fluid ** Bathtub, a large open container for water, in which a person may wash their body ** Public bathing, a public place where people bathe * Thermae, ancient Roman public bathing facilities Plac ...

Vacuum cleaner A vacuum cleaner, also known simply as a vacuum, is a device that uses suction, and often agitation, in order to remove dirt and other debris from carpets, hard floors, and other surfaces. The dirt is collected into a dust bag or a plastic bin. ...

Dishwasher A dishwasher is a machine that is used to clean dishware, cookware, and cutlery automatically. Unlike dishwashing, manual dishwashing, which relies on physical scrubbing to remove soiling, the mechanical dishwasher cleans by spraying hot wat ...

Washing machine A washing machine (laundry machine, clothes washer, washer, or simply wash) is a machine designed to laundry, launder clothing. The term is mostly applied to machines that use water. Other ways of doing laundry include dry cleaning (which uses ...

Clothes dryer A clothes dryer (tumble dryer, drying machine, drying device, or simply dryer) is a powered Home appliance, household appliance that is used to remove moisture from a load of clothing, bedding and other textiles, usually after they are washed in ...

Hair dryer A hair dryer (the handheld type also referred to as a blow dryer) is an electromechanical device that blows ambient air in hot or warm settings for styling or drying hair. Hair dryers enable better control over the shape and style of hair, by a ...

Electric lighting

* Fluorescent light bulb *

Incandescent light bulb An incandescent light bulb, also known as an incandescent lamp or incandescent light globe, is an electric light that produces illumination by Joule heating a #Filament, filament until it incandescence, glows. The filament is enclosed in a ...

LED light bulb An LED lamp or LED light is an electric light that produces light using light-emitting diodes (LEDs). LED lamps are significantly more Electrical efficiency, energy-efficient than equivalent Incandescent light bulb, incandescent lamps and f ...

Cooking appliances

Barbecue Barbecue or barbeque (often shortened to BBQ worldwide; barbie or barby in Australia and New Zealand) is a term used with significant regional and national variations to describe various cooking methods that employ live fire and smoke to coo ...

* Bread maker *

Blender A blender (sometimes called a mixer (from Latin ''mixus, the PPP of miscere eng. to Mix)'' or liquidiser in British English) is a kitchen and laboratory appliance used to mix, crush, purée or emulsify food and other substances. A stationary ...

Coffee machine A coffeemaker, coffee maker or coffee machine is a cooking appliance used to brew coffee. While there are many different types of coffeemakers, the two most common brewing principles use gravity or pressure to move hot water through coffee ...

Faucet A tap (also spigot or faucet: see usage variations) is a valve controlling the release of a fluid. Nomenclature United Kingdom * Tap is used in the United Kingdom and most of the Commonwealth for any everyday type of valve, particularly ...

Food processor A food processor is a kitchen appliance used to facilitate repetitive tasks in the preparation of food. Today, the term almost always refers to an electric-motor-driven appliance, although there are some manual devices also referred to as "food ...

Microwave oven A microwave oven, or simply microwave, is an electric oven that heats and cooks food by exposing it to electromagnetic radiation in the microwave frequency range. This induces Dipole#Molecular dipoles, polar molecules in the food to rotate and ...

* Mixer *

Oven upA double oven A ceramic oven An oven is a tool that is used to expose materials to a hot environment. Ovens contain a hollow chamber and provide a means of heating the chamber in a controlled way. In use since antiquity, they have been use ...

* Rotimatic

Food storage and preservation

Food storage container Food storage containers are widespread in use throughout the world and have probably been in use since the first human civilizations. History Early civilizations In early civilizations cereal grains such as maize, wheat, barley etc. were stored ...

Canning Canning is a method of food preservation in which food is processed and sealed in an airtight container (jars like Mason jars, and steel and tin cans). Canning provides a shelf life that typically ranges from one to five years, although under ...

Refrigerator A refrigerator, commonly shortened to fridge, is a commercial and home appliance consisting of a thermal insulation, thermally insulated compartment and a heat pump (mechanical, electronic or chemical) that transfers heat from its inside to ...

Home maintenance

Groundskeeping equipment Groundskeeping is the activity of tending an area of land for aesthetic or functional purposes, typically in an institutional setting. It includes mowing grass, trimming hedges, pulling weeds, planting flowers, etc. The U.S. Department of Labor e ...

Garden tool A garden tool is any one of many tools made for gardening and landscaping, which overlap with the range of tools made for agriculture and horticulture. Garden tools can be divided into hand tools and power tools. Hand tools Today's garden to ...

s * Paint sprayer

Air conditioning

Air conditioner Air conditioning, often abbreviated as A/C (US) or air con (UK), is the process of removing heat from an enclosed space to achieve a more comfortable interior temperature, and in some cases, also controlling the humidity of internal air. Air c ...

* Central heating unit * Fan

Computer systems

Data storage device Data ( , ) are a collection of discrete or continuous values that convey information, describing the quantity, quality, fact, statistics, other basic units of meaning, or simply sequences of symbols that may be further interpreted form ...

* Personal computer * Telephone *

Video game console A video game console is an electronic device that Input/output, outputs a video signal or image to display a video game that can typically be played with a game controller. These may be home video game console, home consoles, which are generally ...

Knitting machine A knitting machine is a device used to create knitting, knitted fabrics in a semi or fully automated fashion. There are numerous types of knitting machines, ranging from simple spool or board templates with no moving parts to highly complex mec ...

* Plumbing *

Home router A residential gateway is a small consumer-grade gateway which bridges network access between connected local area network (LAN) hosts to a wide area network (WAN) (such as the Internet) via a modem, or directly connects to a WAN (as in EttH), wh ...

Power generation

Solar panels A solar panel is a device that converts sunlight into electricity by using photovoltaic (PV) cells. PV cells are made of materials that produce excited electrons when exposed to light. These electrons flow through a circuit and produce direct ...

Wind Turbine A wind turbine is a device that wind power, converts the kinetic energy of wind into electrical energy. , hundreds of thousands of list of most powerful wind turbines, large turbines, in installations known as wind farms, were generating over ...

Home security

Surveillance camera A closed-circuit television camera is a type of surveillance camera that transmits video signals to a specific set of monitors or video recording devices, rather than broadcasting the video over public airwaves. The term "closed-circuit televisi ...

s * Alarm systems *

Electronic lock An electronic lock (or electric lock) is a Lock (security device), locking device which operates by means of electric current. Electric locks are sometimes stand-alone with an electronic control assembly mounted directly to the lock. Electric lo ...

Home automation

In the 21st century, especially by the 2010s, home automation has increasingly been introduced into the modern household, colloquially referred to as smart home technology. While the technology was already in development in the 1990s, only in the next two decades was

local area network A local area network (LAN) is a computer network that interconnects computers within a limited area such as a residence, campus, or building, and has its network equipment and interconnects locally managed. LANs facilitate the distribution of da ...

ing ubiquitous in the home, thanks to the introduction of

computer networking A computer network is a collection of communicating computers and other devices, such as printers and smart phones. In order to communicate, the computers and devices must be connected by wired media like copper cables, optical fibers, or b ...

. Since modern home networks often make use of wireless networking (e.g.

Wi-Fi Wi-Fi () is a family of wireless network protocols based on the IEEE 802.11 family of standards, which are commonly used for Wireless LAN, local area networking of devices and Internet access, allowing nearby digital devices to exchange data by ...

), modern automation can easily be set up without having to run wires through the building. Alternatively, they can be connected to wired networks.

Types of home automation

* Smart home appliances * Automatic vacuum cleaners and other

Domestic robot A domestic robot or homebot is a type of service robot, an autonomous robot that is primarily used for household chores, but may also be used for education, entertainment or therapy. While most domestic robots are simplistic, some are connect ...

s * Smart locks *

Smart speaker A smart speaker is a type of loudspeaker and voice command device with an integrated virtual assistant (artificial intelligence), virtual assistant that offers interactive actions and Hands-free computing, hands-free activation with the help of o ...

s, with voice controlled digital personal assistants.

Concerns towards home automation

Unlike older forms of domestic technology, smart appliances are Internet-facing, and there have been many concerns that

cyberattacks A cyberattack (or cyber attack) occurs when there is an unauthorized action against computer infrastructure that compromises the confidentiality, integrity, or availability of its content. The rising dependence on increasingly complex and inte ...

may be conducted on insecure home appliances. A kind of attack is to deploy malware on smart home appliances known as botnets, which can be controlled by a remote attacker.

References

External links

ICS 97.040.30 Domestic refrigerating appliances
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