Artificial Intelligence in the Home

Problem: In a tenant-landlord relationship, it is the landlord's responsibility to maintain their property and to fix broken things. It is also the tenant's responsibility to advise their landlord of any issues. However, many tenants are scared to do so, due to fear of backlash from mentioning a problem, or being seen as a bad tenant and somehow being the cause of a broken thing, even if it had nothing to do with them. Many times this results in unhappy tenants and landlords being unaware of the extent of a problem. Most landlords in HRV's State of the Home Survey believe they're good to their tenants and respond quickly to their concerns, but most renters hold the completely opposite view.

From the landlords point of view: "Well if my tenants can't tell me about what's wrong with it, then I can't fix stuff?" 
From the tenants point of view: "I don't want to tell my landlord about the mould because what if they get mad at me and imply that it's my fault? There's nothing stopping them from assuming that." 

Property managers are not a good solution to this problem either, as they are completely unregulated, and you have no guarantee that they will do a good job or even benefit you at all.

"The snag is the Authority has limited power to act. It can only make a finding of "unsatisfactory conduct" against a licensee for "real estate agency work", which doesn't include property management. It may take action if a licensee is guilty of "misconduct". But the bar for misconduct is high and most complaints don't meet it.

A case in point: an owner alleged the property manager had failed to prevent a tenant running a tattoo parlour in a flat and failed to follow-up rent owed by another tenant in the same building. The police eventually contacted the owner about the tattoo parlour after complaints from other residents. But the evidence didn't meet the threshold for misconduct and the case was dismissed." - Consumer NZ 

Solution: What if the house could tell the landlord what is wrong with it as a knowledgeable and unbiased artificial intelligence, and the tenants had less responsibility in that area? This data tracking would also come in handy in  

AI in Houses: Research + Precedents

https://www.forbes.com/sites/freddiedawson/2016/05/24/the-house-that-learns-bringing-artificial-intelligence-into-the-home/#314b4ab63fa3

A new London startup wants to make controlling a smart-home more natural and intuitive. It plans to do this through the introduction of he addition of ‘teachable’ programming and visual input methods to instruct a home-hub. Current models rely on voice or the use of apps for input of instructions. But AI Build’s prototype will be the first to include a range of cameras as well.

• Privacy issues with cameras in my particular setting (tenants rights)? But also benefits... due to more information
• Temperature tracking is useful because then the landlord and the tenant can track their behaviour 
• Automatically tracks the data for you, and then you would press a button to send that data to your landlord... or would it be sent automatically? Like weekly or monthly reports? Whatever is most effective 

User Journey 2

Commonly, renting comes with problems and ambiguity as to what things are who's responsibility, with tenants and landlords being confused sometimes.

1. The Artificial Intelligence house is always monitoring things like temperature, humidity, and airflow in the house, and is connected to things like the washing machine, dishwasher, fridge, etc etc to monitor these also.

2. This data will be helpful in predicting problems before they arise, such as defining areas of the house that are damper than others or colder than others, which could contribute to mould etc etc, or monitoring how often a washing machine or dishwasher is used, which would be used to aid maintenance checks and stuff.

3. If a certain area was coming close to being a problem, or a device was close to needing maintenance or on the verge of being a problem, the data collected by the AI house would come in handy for determining the cause of an issue, whether it was going to happen anyway or whether the tenant had done anything to exacerbate the issue or not.

4. The process might go like - constant data collection on temperature, humidity levels, airflow, etc etc, and then recommendations would be given to the tenant as to when to turn on the heating or when to have windows open and stuff, for optimum preservation of the property and even the tenant's health. And the data would tell when the tenant would listen to the AI's recommendations for their behaviour and tell them the benefits and stuff. This might be confidential at first or if the tenant wanted to share their data with the landlord they could. 

5. If something was close to being a problem and the AI had determined it was an issue with the house and not the tenants behaviour in the house, it could be sent by the tenant to the landlord with statistics for exactly what happened etc etc, then they would be much more prepared for any eventuality. 

-- System to monitor the houses performance... cheaper and easier to monitor things as they come up rather than fix the problem 

-- Appliances being quite difficult... setting up a system for temperature and ventilation is very easy, formulas, easy 

-- Heating... the legal requirements of heating like connected to a government thing that controlled it or something 

-- Not energy conscious, put the system in for a month - baseline reading of how the house performance, and then after that you impose design solutions and simulate that to quantify the benefits that you would get from the design solutions. 

-- if it was government subsidised thing to help landlords stick to the laws in the path of least resistance, the easiest way possible... if you could actually see the benefits. 

-- if you put in too much insulation and not enough ventilation, it creates another problem coz you need both