Technology is changing our homes. Is it changing us to? From American public media

this is Marketplace Tech I'm Lily Dramale. There's always been something aspirational about the term smart home.

It was coined by a residential builder association here in the US back in the mid 80s.

That of course was long before the invention of tech that we now think of as hallmarks of a smart home.

Things like cloud-based voice assistance and lighting systems controlled by apps.

There's also the refrigerator that not only tracks expiration dates, but even writes grocery lists for you.

42% of American households with internet now own at least one smart home device and Professor Heather Suzanne Woods of Kansas State

University has been asking whether that's a good thing. She's out with a new book

called Threshold How Smart Homes Change us inside and out. In a recent interview I began

by asking her how the industry has gone about marketing the smart home to consumers.

A smart home can be anything we want it to be in this

utopia that maybe doesn't exist but we're getting close to it with the use of

technology and so that that definitely struck me when I was doing some of my early research in the book.

I went out to a number of smart homes throughout the United States.

I also went to conferences where they were pitching tech products and there was

the sense that we can have better living through technology. So there's this sort of futuristic framework.

It's really about a sense of convenience or a sense of ease or pleasure or joy.

But this sort of really positive shiny chrome exterior doesn't always reflect what is happening

under the surface.

Tell me what you mean by that. So I simply mean that, well, the main argument of the book is that smart homes are changing how we live inside and

so there are maybe some context or

there are maybe some contacts or examples

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