HomeTech.fm - Episode 359 - Wellness Pseudoscience

Episode Date: July 30, 2021

This week on HomeTech: SNPO shares go on sale, at a discount, Alexa gains a killer new feature, and Seth goes off on a rant about the “wellness” trend. All of this and a fun pick of the week on this week's podcast.

Hey, this is the Home Tech Podcast for Friday, July 30th. I'm Seth Johnson, and welcome to the Home Tech Podcast. The podcast is all about all aspects of home technology, home automation, lots of, well, we've got a couple of rants this week, too, so this should be fun. Been watching the Olympics. Hope everybody else has been keeping an eye on that. It's been hard. It's been hard to watch.

I thought it'd be easier this year, 2021. Streaming is a thing. Cable cutting has been a thing. Still not really easily able to get a a live feed of like just random Olympic games, right? Like it's just why not? I don't know. I paid five bucks for the Peacock app because when all of the articles are like, oh, Peacock is where NBC was planning on just roll. They were planning on rolling out Peacock the same time as the Olympics. And that was going to be their big push for Peacock. And, um, it sucks. I don't know how it's just replays in something called the Tokyo channel, which is boring. Like I want to see

the real good stuff. Uh, and I, I can't, so I bought a VPN. I've got a VPN. I can get into Canada there. So like Greg, it says, yeah, unless you're in Canada. Exactly. Exactly. That was the idea. I, I, I, I, I have been in Canada watching some things, but it's just a pain to like, I don't know. I've got it. I've got it. It's hard to get it like on a big screen TV, easy to get on a phone, easy to get on a tablet. But like if you want to get on your big screen, you need to put that device or all of your devices in your house on that VPN and pipe it out to Canada to get the good old CBC broadcast, which is great from what from what I've seen. It's good.

It's better than the lousy NBC commentators because they're garbage. So I'm back to watching the antenna just for the NBC coverage, lousy NBC coverage. But man, I really wish there was a way that you could just grab a decent feed and watch it. Just of one of the things they're covering, it seems like there's cameras everywhere out there.

They're catching all the moments, just not like dedicated. Like you would think that the Peacock app, if they were covering the Olympics with it, you would have like a grid guide of all the events and be able to tune in anytime you want. I haven't seen that. And I really haven't figured out if that's even on there. Um, so no more $5 for you Peacock because nothing on there that I want to see anyway. Um, yeah, it's cool to see like skateboarding being an event this year. It's kind of really cool. Like surfing too. Um, and I always seem to run across new sports that I don't know are sports every time, like the Olympics are, um, you guys guys know there's a three by three basketball, like like streetball, like three by three, three on three basketball.

And like didn't even know it didn't even know it was a sport. It's got like they play on half court, just like we did when we were kids. Right. No breaks. Twelve second shot clocks. Ten minute periods. First team to 21 wins. It's like streetball. That's great.

It's an Olympic sport. So like all the stuff we did as kids, it's now Olympic sports. Why not? Why not? Want to touch on our home tech talks this week. Last week we said, will matter matter? And we had like an extended discussion on what matter is. A little bit more deep dive into it. I think there's still a lot up in the air on the spec and what it can do. So we're just going to have to keep an eye on it and see how it's implemented in the actual field when it comes out. I know I kind of leaned heavy into the Zigbee aspect of it on the show here, but we talked a lot more about the other things that Matter can do, can connect over other networks besides Zigbee or Thread or whatever they're calling it. It's still Zigbee in my heart. But it's going to be an interesting spec because it's further up the stack for developers

at Amazon or Apple to work with and developers of any smart home product. It's just, it removes them one more step away from the bare metal processors and having to deal with that radio technology and all that good stuff. So we'll see how it works. We'll see how it works out. It should be interesting. Tomorrow, they're going to do a design review part one, and I'm going to kind of go over some of the things that I did as far as designs when they were coming up and hopefully other people's will want to share what they're doing for designs as they come up. I've got a interesting little project to kind of like put together for a friend and we'll see how that goes. But with that, why don't we jump into some home tech headlines? Well, Alexa routines can now be

triggered using multiple custom phrases, which makes it easier for everyone in a household to initiate smart home automations without having to remember the exact key wording for names of scenes or devices. For example, instead of having to remember Alexa goodnight, which seems like it's pretty easy to remember, but you know, whatever. You may say it differently. You can now assign additional phrases like Alexa bedtime or Alexa night night. And you can even add Alexa Bonnui, which is like French, I guess. Because Amazon has support for multilingual households, you can add up to seven custom phrases, which all can be assigned over to the same routine.

This is a killer feature. It really is. This is really what attracts me to Josh AI and what they were doing over there, where you can add aliases in for just about everything, the devices, the scenes. Josh AI really lets you get in there. And if something isn't triggering correctly, or the system thinks that you are saying something you're not, you could just go in there and if something isn't triggering correctly or the system thinks that you are saying something you're not, you could just go in there and give that device or that scene an alias and magically it starts saying, oh, well, they mean this when they say that. So yeah, that's really cool. This type of feature is certainly welcome. It helps move past that,

you know, command line feel of how these devices have worked in the past. And we have to like recite certain incantations like you have to recite them exactly. So the seeing their device, it gets controlled. So keep it up, Amazon. It's a really cool feature. Glad they were able to add that in. Well, today was the day. 13,850,000 shares of snap one common stock went on sale

this morning for price of 18 a share with an estimated uh proceeds of 249 million dollars the company had hoped the ipo would be between 18 and 22 dollars per share but wall street had other ideas uh shares quickly fell $16 after opening and closed out the day at $16.55, which is down 8% from its IPO price. SnapOne had hoped to use the funds raised from the IPO to pay off most of a $245 million term loan. So the company could free up money to take advantage of new opportunities, both internal inside the company and external. So we'll be, Ty is saying,

dang, no penny stock on the Snappo, which really, really, like, why is it SNPO totally a a missed opportunity for O-Snap. Literally like the, the, one of the coolest marketing things that the company's ever done. Why is it O-S-N-P? I think it would have been, it would have been instantly recognizable, but Snap One, Snap O, I don't know. I don't get it. Missed opportunity. Should have done OSNAP. All right. Moving on, moving on, moving on. Well, I'm going to go on a rant here. This was caused by a story over on CEPRO where it wasn't really a story. It was kind of a slideshow. And I suspect

there'll be a longer article that accompanies it in some one of their magazines and kind of goes over what each one of the slides mean. It was just kind of pictures on their website. But they were kind of saying that wellness really hasn't panned out the way everyone thought it would. Imagine that. So here they've got a couple of statistics from, from, uh, integrators in the, in the space and, uh, uh, from, from consumers as well. And so they said the median percentage of projects with wellness technology included over the past 12 months was 8%, which is much lower than dealers were forecasting during the midst of the pandemic. Um, despite this dealers are expecting numbers of projects to double that have wellness aspects in them over the next 12 months. And there are a couple of ways this might happen, I think. So put a pin in this. I want you to put that pin in and remember, I was talking about this earlier. It's something to note that last year that 36% of the dealers believed this and

now that's dropped down to 20. So dealers are kind of losing faith in this wellness thing. And I don't know, there's still some of them that are bullish about it, but we'll have to see. Clients in general seem to be undereducated about the technology too. So not that there's like much to understand or really learn about this stuff, but only 20 of them, 25% of them reported that they have a good understanding, but want to know more. And only 1%, that's only 1% higher than last year. So really there's, hasn't been either, there hasn't been the education provided to clients out there, or just education doesn't exist. And, and, and my, my book, I think you can kind of hear where I'm headed with this. The education doesn't exist because it doesn't exist. And here's where things kind of get

interesting. Wellness-centric product awareness among integrators. Most dealers have heard of HCL, human-centric lighting, which is the worst name of anything. Adaptive lighting. We've all kind of talked about that in the past. It's where the lights will change colors to match what you see in the daytime, I guess. And then as night comes, they will change colors and be more amber, more warm and inviting. And that's to simulate sunset, I suppose, and get into your circ you know, you feel good and have less anxiety at the end of the day. I'm not sure, but that's what the, uh, that's what the idea is behind it. Um, the second most was EPA indoor air plus I've actually heard of this. Yeah. You know, it's, it's a certification

that you can get with certain air filters and, and, and setups inside of house, uh, three well certifications,. Four, biophilia design. Five and six were kind of the same thing, I thought, which was CAPS, which I actually have heard of, which is certified aging in place. Somehow that got lumped into wellness because no one else, no one wants to talk about it in any other way. And then living in place, kind of the same thing, just growing old inside of a house. Um, those are further down the list and, you know, mostly hear about that stuff from consultant. And then number seven was D D Los Darwin. Now got to admit, never heard of this thing, looked it up. It seems to be Australian

centric and kind of like a company that has wrapped a bunch of these, uh, wellness technologies together and kind of like pushes them out like water filters and air filters and that kind of thing along with looks like a little app and stuff i have to check into that a little bit more and and see uh what all that's about but seven on the list i've never even heard of it so um none of these other than the adaptive lighting which i'm not calling human hcl or human central lighting anymore it's adaptive lighting it's a better name for it. None of them broke the 50% mark on the survey. So it's kind of, kind of embarrassing that, you know, out of all these technologies, really the only one anybody is talking about is adaptive lighting. Most frequently installed are air sensors,

filters, like followed by motorized shades with timers to basically go up and down with the sunrise and sunset. Adaptive lighting, of course, that we talked about. Central vacuum, immersive fitness gear, water quality monitoring, nature soundscaping, which is kind of interesting, I guess. If you want to pump in birds and chirping in the woods in the morning to wake up, you can do that. Roma infusers. So there's your little oil things that you set up, I guess. I don't know who's selling that, but all right. Smart sleep technology.

There's your mattresses, thanks to Cedia and Propel. And nature-related visuals, like wall art and that kind of thing. 69% of integrators reported that the coronavirus accelerated their plans to incorporate wellness into their business model. And that's actually down from 82% who anticipated ramping that up last year. So I don't know, 82 down to 69. It seems like dealers are losing interest in it. Um, dealers are less likely to pursue initiatives that would actually bring wellness business into their business, like training, marketing, getting new, going out and figuring out what new vendors they need to pick up, installing that stuff in their showrooms, or even hiring a wellness expert for their business and someone to work inside their business.

And it's kind of low priority and down on the list. So it doesn't seem like there's very much interest to sell this stuff. And the last couple of sites were pretty useless on there. I thought they didn't provide much more information other than like opinions on like who dealers thought they should sell to and how, where it should go. Um, I imagine that's kind of different in every market and kind of gets down into like the extremely niche, uh, you know, who, who you think your customers are and who you think you can sell to. It doesn't really provide broad data on anything. Overall, I think people are just flat uninterested in this.

I'm going to write it here, pseudoscience. if you have a specific need for cleaner air, you might feel better if the light turns on and off from blue to amber as you go to bed at night. And there might be product out there for you. But you see all those qualifiers I kind of have to put on there, like feel and need and might. That's, that's before we even talk about, like, even if these products exist in the first place, much less if they're even reliable and do what they say they're going to do. One of the things that, that I mentioned earlier, caps have dealt with them for a long time. It's kind of the same thing and, and caps. So that's certified aging in place. Um, that that's, that's where you would build a house

for someone who is going from being a healthy adult into kind of like the end of their years. And a lot of it's like making sure that the house can be or is wheelchair acceptable, making sure that the doors are built to a certain width, like there's no doors inside the house that you couldn't get a wheelchair through, that kind of thing.

You actually raise the outlets up, so where you don't have to bend down so far to plug them in. Kind of actually some decent ideas in caps. But all of the stuff that has been brought to this industry for having smart sensors to monitor medication and, you know, motion detectors or cameras to check in on grandma from 3000 miles away. I don't know. I think just even here in Florida, that stuff kind of falls flat because. Privacy, right, and independence, really like grandma doesn't want to be bothered with that stuff, much, much less. She didn't even have Internet in the first place. So that's already a hurdle. Uh, and then you're talking

about putting all this technology in there. Um, so I guess you don't have to call or she doesn't have to call you every day. I don't know. It just doesn't seem like it's a long-term solution for anyone, uh, any party interested. If you get what I'm trying to say here, it, it's just not a great idea. Um, it certainly provides an income for a lot of consultants out there. And I kind of think that's where the nature wellness biophilia stuff is coming from too. It's, it's there. It exists.

If you are really a cheerleader behind this stuff, I suppose you can use that as a sales tactic to sell some of this stuff. If you think you can make money off of it for a particular client who's interested in it. But it's definitely not for everybody. It's totally not for everybody. These topics are so broad. I just don't see how there's that much interest in them, right? Like you're talking about air quality, water filters, that kind of thing. Like it's just, I don't know. It just seems like they're trying to cover all the bases here. And I don't know, it's not really backed by anything, either product or science. One of the last lines here in the article or slideshow says color changing lights in an office environment can increase productivity. It's like, but can it?

And if it does, by how much? How much do you need to spend on your color-changing lights to increase your productivity by 1%? Do you compare that to standing up from behind your desk, like getting a standing desk? Do you compare that to getting outside and walking around the block halfway through the day? Does that minimal thing that you can do, uh, increase your productivity more than your

color changing lights? I don't know. No one knows. There's no studies on it. There's nothing out there there. I found one article, I found a bunch of articles, but they all kind of like reference all these studies that are out there and claims. And there's, there's one on medium. I'll link the show notes. I've listed a bunch of studies from 2009. Um, but wait And there's one on Medium. I'll link the show notes. I list a bunch of studies from 2009. But wait, there's always something here. Most of these studies just involve a handful of people. And when I say a handful, I mean like less than 20. There's one, biodynamic lighting effects on the sleep pattern of people with dementia. Okay, not really applicable to me, but let's go for it. 2019, 61 patients. Sounds good. Only 30, 13 of them completed the data and only four patients actually completed the entire survey.

Seven of those were kind of a control. They, seven of the 13, uh, were controlled. They didn't experience any different lighting at all. Six out of the 13 were exposed to the um biodynamic lighting so okay we're basing all these claims on four people come on uh study number two study the effects of naturalistic lighting on dineural plasma melatonin blah blah i don't know in stroke patients okay not really applicable to me either i don't know as soon as I get through this, I might have a stroke. Um, anyway, 2019, 43 participants. Hmm. Okay. 43 participants. That's great. It wasn't really, it was kind of about melatonin and like if the melatonin was increased based on the natural lighting and it says it may have been out of those 43 stroke patients. I don't know. Maybe we should have more than 43 people check this out to check this out. I don't, I don't know. Maybe we should have more than 43 people check this out to check this out.

I don't, I don't know. Um, workplace lighting. This is a big one. Workplace lighting for improving alertness and mood for daytime workings, uh, workers, uh, 2018. So fairly recent. Uh, it's not even a study. It was just a search through databases that they did for research, but you know, we'll, we'll give them that. Uh, here's some quotes from here. I thought were interesting. We found no studies comparing one level of luminescence versus another. We found no studies comparing light of a particular illuminance and light spectrum or CCT, which is color correction, versus another combination of illuminance and light spectrum. We found no studies comparing daylight versus artificial light. We found one study with 64 participants comparing the effects

of different proportions of direct and indirect light. There was no substantial difference in mood or adverse events such as ocular reading or concentration problems in the short or medium term. We graded the quality of evidence as very low. This is all quotes from this thing. And this is from pro, this is from the pro adaptive lighting article right like this is what they are citing in certain in their studies is like this is the evidence that natural lighting can help you be more productive i don't know i don't think it can i don't think this is really something that we should be like shooting like spending a lot of time on um and it's it's mind-boggling to me that with adaptive lighting in particular, that we should be pushing this snake oil product on people. Sure, it's cool.

I will give you that it's cool that your lights will change colors and match the sunlight temperature outside. And when it gets, you know, close to sunset, it gives you that warm, fuzzy glow and matches the fireplace you have going in the corner. That's cool. But let's not, let's not, let's not attach it to your wellness or your science based on the evidence that's being put forth here until there's real evidence and real backed up peer reviewed claims. I don't know. Make your own conclusions on this. But I will say don't take advice from, uh, don't take medical advice from a podcast and probably shouldn't be taking it from C pro either. So, uh, anyway, that wraps up my rant. I, I am just blown away about how this one particular topic has been

just festering there. When, when I haven't talked to one dealer who believes in this thing, not one, if you are, please reach out to me. I would love to talk to you. I think it's a great sales thing. If you have the client, I think air quality is actually a much stronger position to take, especially in places out West, like California, where they have a lot of fires and you need to have filtration systems inside the house to make sure that those particulates are taken out. I think that's an easier sell. Now, is that for an integrator?

I don't know. I don't know. But when you go over to CE Pro and like they literally have like a stamp, I swear this is like something they can do. They have a template and it says is blank the next profit center for CE pros. And it's like, then they, they write an article, which is roughly the same article as they said before. So it's wellness this time it's adaptive lighting next time it's solar panels. I've seen one that says plumbing. They have one that's features plumbing. They want you to get to your plumber.

Uh, I've seen all sorts of like, eventually they're going to be saying is, is digging trenches, the next profit center for CE pros. Like, I, I just, I don't understand. Like we're barely good. I've seen pictures. We're barely good at hanging TV straight. Like, let's, let's get that down to a science first guys. Let's get that down and then move on to trying to figure out how to install air filters in people's homes. I, I'm just, I don't know. I, I I'm, I'm going off on a rant on this thing because I, I, I do think this is garbage. I do like our industry and I don't like when garbage comes into it just, just for a matter of sales. Like there's, there's really no reason, uh, to, to have a custom integrator who is working on your theater say, Oh yeah, I can sell you HEPA filters for your air conditioner. I don't get it. I really

don't, guys. I'm sorry. I don't get it. But there you go. All the links and topics we discussed tonight can be found in our show notes over at hometech.fm slash 359. Again, that link is hometech.fm slash 359. Don't forget you can join us in the chat room starting Wednesday, sometime between 7 and 7.30 p.m. Eastern. It's a lot later tonight because I was up researching all these stupid studies that have 10 people in them and four people that actually fill out the forms. Anyway, got a cool pick of the week this week, and it has to be the play date so the this is a a little gaming system pre-order start on the 29th which is tomorrow for me but yesterday for you if you're listening to this on friday um so it brings it back up to the news this week it's a really cool

like retro style game system that kind of looks like if a cross between like if a game boy had a baby with a fishing reel um it's made by Panic in Seattle, which is kind of one of my favorite software developers out there for the Mac. And they've done a lot of really cool stuff. I run their software daily on my computer. But they have gone into like gaming in the past. They made a real cool game called Firewatch.

And then they have started this project where they're making hardware for games. It's got a 2.7 then they have, uh, have, have started this project where they're making hardware for, for games. Uh, it's got a 2.7 inch mono screen, which is kind of retro kind of like think about the game boy screen. It's got USB-C wifi, Bluetooth for connectivity and charging a headphone jack. And also has a little crank on the side that folds out for a game, like maybe a fishing game. I don't know. I don't know what you're going to have with it, but like you can use a little crank, like a fishing reel. It's bright, it's bright yellow. So kind of hard to miss. Um, hopefully it doesn't get lost like my Apple remotes and things that kind of slip in underneath the couch or whatever. So, uh, it's really cool. Uh, it has a Lua based SDK

too, for developers. Um, that's kind of like wide open for anyone to use and you can sideload community games on it or games you make on it. It should be really cool for, um, when, when the mass populations get, get, get ahold of this and start tinkering around with, it's going to be a real fun thing for not only, um, people who like to play games, but people who like to program games. I think it's going to be a pretty cute little platform. Uh, it's $179 kind of, they went up about $30 from, I think about two years games. I think it's going to be a pretty cute little platform. It's $179. Kind of,

they went up about $30 from, I think about two years ago, I think they said that was going to be 149. But it's of course gone up with, with everything that's going on. It's great looking product from a really cool company. If you want to check out that it's at play.date. So like you write play.date and hit enter in your browser and it gets you there. Like when did date become a domain like.com? But you know, play date. Pretty cool.

Check it out. If you have any feedback, questions, comments, picks of the week or great ideas for the show, give me a shout. Email address is feedback at hometech.fm. You can visit hometech.fm

slash feedback and fill out the online form. And I want to give a big thank you to everyone who supports the show, but especially those who are able to financially support the show through the Patreon page. If you don't know about the Patreon page, head on over to hometech.fm support to learn how you can support Hometech for as little as a dollar a month.

Any pledge over five bucks a month gets you a big shout out on the show, but every pledge gets you an invite to our private slash chat, the hub where everyone is in there. I think we were talking about, uh, we've talked about all sorts of stuff recently. Uh, TJ is back in there causing trouble and bringing up some interesting topics, you know, computer wise, camera wise. Um, I think I found a cool camera, camera system. I'm going to try and track it down. Um, but, and see how well it works before I bring it up on the show or in the hub there. But as I was going down another rabbit hole tonight, I got lost on cameras and found this cool thing from some links that were posted in the hub there. So there's

always something to find in there, and it's really cool. Not only do you get access to the hub, you also get access to the Home Tech Chalks, which they are recorded and I will be posting them. I just don't know when because of all the time it takes me to edit them and then find time to put them up. So that's one of the things about this show that you may not know. Uh, it has been a labor of love for, uh, for Jason and myself and this year myself, uh, to do, but it's been a labor of love because it's so like so easy to write up the show, produce it and, uh, sit down and talk about home technology, uh, hit record. And then like, hopefully not do much editing later on. Like it's a really

fast process but video takes forever like i'm not i don't have a workflow for that especially after five years of only audio so it just takes a little bit longer sorry about that guys if you want to help out the show but can't support the show financially totally appreciate a five star review on itunes or positive reading in the podcast app of your choice. And I hope everyone has a great week, has had a great week and, uh, has a great, she's just popping in saying, I missed it. Yeah. Thanks Rashid. You didn't miss the ending here. So thanks for, thanks for coming in, uh, right at the last minute, uh minute as I'm wrapping up the show. But yeah, I hope everybody's having a great week.

That pretty much wraps up in the home tech headlines this week. Still pretty light out there because I think we're in the summer months, of course. It's when everybody's taking their vacations and doing some family and businesses in general are getting ready for kind of that Cedia news cycle. That's going to come up in September. I suspect some of them are going to be announcing stuff a little bit earlier. Um, you know, just to kind of get ahead of those, get it, get out in front of everything. But yeah, most, uh, companies are targeting kind of their release stuff towards, towards that Cedia timeframe where that timeframe where they'll put it in and announce it then. So I think until we get through August, close to September, we're not going to see much from our industry.

But as we found out with Nokia last week, Nokia and Insteon, anybody can come up with a really cool looking product or a really cool product and release it outside of that need outside of the normal, you know, the normal Cedia based timeframe. So we'll be interesting. We'll be interesting to see what pops up between here and there. And, but with that said, everybody have a great weekend.