GC: n

CT: Automation is still a nascent technology in areas that could potentially revolutionise our professional and private lives in dramatic ways. Innovations in home automation, for example, could allow us to use time and resources more efficiently as all electrical appliances and electronic devices will be fully integrated and connected. Autonomous vehicles could provide our daily transport needs through sophisticated sensing technologies that allow for improvements in safety and fuel consumption.
Autonomous robots – already exploited in fields such as cleaning floors, mowing lawns, and waste water treatment – have the potential to dramatically improve people lives with increasingly sophisticated sensing abilities and the capacity to operate reliably with minimal or no human intervention.
Another area where automation can have a massive impact is nanotechnology which could bring positive change on the environment, energy, healthcare, and medicine. There may be a future involving nanorobots which would assemble products at the atomic scale and can turn one material into another, self-replicating, and being injected into the human body to repair disease at the cellular level.

S: Techuk – https://www.techuk.org/automate-britain/people_centric (last access: 26 December 2014)

N: 1. home (n): Old English ham “dwelling, house, estate, village,” from Proto-Germanic haimaz, from PIE root tkei- “to settle, dwell, be home”.
automation (n): 1948, in the manufacturing sense, coined by Ford Motor Co. Vice President Delmar S. Harder, from automatic + -ion. Earlier (1838) was automatism, which meant “quality of being automatic” in the classical sense.

2. A process or system (using different methods or equipment) which provides the ability to enhance one’s lifestyle, and make a home more comfortable, safe and efficient.

3. Home automation can link lighting, entertainment, security, telecommunications, heating and air conditioning into one centrally controlled system.

S: 1. Etymonline – http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&search=home+automation&searchmode=none (last access: 26 December 2014). 2 & 3. TERMIUM PLUS (last access: 26 December 2014).

SYN: HA, domotics, house automation.

S: GDT (last access: 26 December 2014); TERMIUM PLUS (last access: 26 December 2014).

CR: automation, building automation, computer science, intelligent system, office automation.