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Get your freeze on

LG Electronics wants their new internet fridge to be the hub of your networked home

By Michele Henry

Originally appeared in Shift

You finally make it home after a day you thought you'd never live through. You drop your bags at the door and limply stumble into the kitchen. As you yawn, your eyes survey the countertops, the stove, and then listlessly drift toward the fridge. It's flashing.

Unmoved by your appliance's apparent state of alarm, you raise your hand to the liquid crystal display on its door and press the message icon. Your girlfriend's pretty face pops up and lets you know she's going to be late for dinner; but not to worry she's already started cooking. She called the fridge and had it send the microwave a recipe. The chicken's on the rotisserie and it's almost perfectly nuked.

This scenario is brought to you by LG Electronics, an $81-billion (U.S.) South Korea-based technology company with outlets all over the world. LG envisions an entirely digital dwelling where the essence of convenience is forged by appliances that communicate with one another and in turn can be controlled by a human user from any remote location.

"You'll take everything in your home with you wherever you go," said Syl Cole, product trainer for the home appliance division of LG digital appliances. "Through cellphone and internet you'll have access to anything in your house."

The hub of this home network is The Internet Fridge. Similar to Electrolux's Screenfridge, a prototype of which appeared in the June 2000 issue of Shift, LG's internet refrigerator has been running homes in South Korea for almost two years, has already made its debut in Britain and is set to be unleashed on North America this November.

Courtesy of LG, what is now a mere repository of leftover meals may soon become a throbbing center of assimilation. Via the internet, the fridge will be able to activate, deactivate and install programs into household items such as the microwave, washing machine, air conditioner or security system -- to name but a few. The brain of this smart fridge is a fully functional PC and LG boasts that its features will revolutionize efficiency and ease operating in daily life.

Aside from its video messaging capabilities, the refrigerator's built-in camera allows any dieter to snap a nudie picture of his corpulent person and use it as a screensaver that doubles as a hunger repellant. The fridge can also keep track of the age of its contents, act as a television, play music, store calendar and schedule information, display the nutritional value of thousands of foods, conjure novel recipes appropriate to the ingredients you own and memorize your grocery list. In addition, it is monitored 24-hours-a-day seven-days-a-week so the maintenance department will know if something is amiss before the customer does. In the future, the repairman may contact you about a problem. As well, product manufacturers may install Bluetooth technology into the casings of various benign food items, such as milk, so that one day the perishable contents of your fridge may be able to reorder themselves when they expire.

"This thing is not a toy," said Cole predicting that shortly it will be impossible to conduct daily life without the aid of this titanium-coloured item. "It has useful functions for the average family. It will enhance their lives."

But does this inanimate food-storage device really have the capacity to enrich the lives of its users? Yes, it delivers messages, but so does call answer. It keeps tabs on your appointments, but so does your PalmPilot. If properly connected it will allow you to interact with your appliances from the office -- but what if you weren't diligent when you left the house in the morning and so forgot to load your chicken into the microwave?

"It sounds like technology is looking for a problem to solve," says Kim Vicente, professor of mechanics and industrial engineering at the University of Toronto and author of The Human Factor: Revolutionizing the Way We Live With Technology, a book pending release in the fall of 2002. "When we [at the university] design, we start with people's needs and then use technology as a means to solve them."

Though Vicente confirms that this home network is feasible from a technological standpoint, where convenience is concerned he poses a fundamental question: "Does this technology simplify lives and solve problems or does it make things worse, with more complications?"

Take this scenario described by an LG representative: An eight-year-old kid comes home from school and finds himself alone in the house and hungry. He picks up the phone and dials his mother at work. As they discuss options the kid grabs some meatloaf from the fridge and plops it into the toaster oven. From her desk the mother activates the device and heats the food.

"If a kid knows how to use a phone he can press buttons on a microwave," says Vicente, chuckling at the redundant use of technology. "I don't know anyone who has a burning desire for this type of stuff."

Perhaps of more consequence, having an internet-based home arena may lead to the loss of privacy. Already, companies anxious to obtain consumer information have been taking advantage of the internet to track product use and purchasing habits. With an online fridge acting as the sensory organ of the corporate world, businesses and individuals at large may be able to gain direct knowledge of what goes on inside a contained, private home.

"They're already trying to track habits," says Michael Geist, law professor at the University of Ottawa and columnist for The Globe and Mail. "This takes it to a more personal level -- it's more invasive." With this burgeoning technology there is a convenience-privacy trade-off. In exchange for perfectly toasted bread and the ability to do laundry from out of town, you surrender the exclusive rights to your daily routine.

However frightening this live-in spy fridge may be, Geist argues that there needn't be a motion to rebel against the advancing household landscape and stop all disclosure of personal information. "It's all about giving people the power to decide how [personal] information is going to be used," says Geist. "Privacy law should protect their choices."

Privacy aside, it may not be prudent to plop a computer, an instrument meant for solitary use, into the kitchen -- a room that is traditionally a spot for social gatherings.

"A good place to spend time with your children, have a conversation, is in the kitchen, over preparing a meal," says Galit Ishaik, clinical psychology Phd. candidate at the University of Waterloo. "What advantage do you get by taking that away?"

For all the bells, whistles, flashing icons and futuristic musings this fridge comes equipped with it may not be that revolutionary after all. "This is nothing more dramatic than anything else throughout the course of human history," says Joan Grusec, developmental psychologist at the University of Toronto. "It doesn't seem to be an exciting new advance."

Perhaps it's not. Who knows? Before we know it, the picture of a man talking to his fridge may seem no more freaky than the sight of people having hands-free cellphone conversations on the street. Or maybe it'll just become an obsolete piece of machinery that we'll chuckle about when we see it on the home show's invention-flop display in 2015 -- just like we're destined to see the talking car of the eighties (remember "the door is ajar"?) or the jiggly electricity-powered exercise belts of the fifties.

Whatever the case, at between seven to ten thousand dollars a pop, the price of convenience -- for now at least -- seems a tad prohibitive.