CES 2025: Home Tech Insights

It’s been a few weeks since CES and I’ve had some time to reflect on what we saw. The hardest part after a big event is trying not to read all the news and analysis so I’m not overly biased by what others found interesting or provocative. Since CES there has been an overwhelming tsunami of other news so I have managed to avoid other CES opinions.

These are the home tech trends we felt were most significant at the show this year. 

Robot cleaning everywhere

With our home tech focus we tend to spend most of our time at the Venetian convention center and this year it felt like most of the floor space had been taken over by robots. Not fun and cute robots, but hardworking robot vacuums, robotic pool cleaners, and robot lawn mowers. The big players had enormous booths and fancy launch events to launch their new offerings. Obviously this is a huge business. 

It feels like new announcements are made by the big robot vacuum players every few months, with constant incremental improvements and techniques to better detangle hair, avoid obstacles like toys and dog poop, and keep mops sanitized and ready to clean. For example, before CES we just finished a review on the Roborock Qrevo Slim that is only 8.2cm high, but at the show they announced the Saros 10R that is 7.98cm. There must be pretty good margins to make such frequent changes.

This year’s big innovations were a robotic arm from Roborock that will pick up small items to get them out of the way, and a Dreame model that will “climb” 6cm obstacles – think bumpy thresholds vs stairs. 

We spent time visiting Roborock, Narwal, Dreame, Eureka and SwitchBot, as well as Aiper and Beatbot in the pool cleaning space. There were so many others selling robot vacuums, pool cleaners and lawn mowers that we just started to tune them out.

One thing we do want to try someday is a window-washing robot – we’ve seen them from Ecovacs and Dreame.  Hopefully we will get one to test sometime soon.

One robot vacuum maker I’ve yet to see at CES – iRobot, the company that started it all. After the failed Amazon acquisition I wonder how long they will be around. 

Air Purification without filters

Air Purification has been around for sometime and it got really hot during the pandemic. Indoor air purifiers are very mainstream now and we’ve noticed them in a lot of small businesses lately. 

One thing that makes these useful devices expensive year after year is continuing to replace the filter. Depending on your home’s issues and occupants, nicer filters that do a good job clearing smoke, allergens, pet hair and dander can cost you hundreds of dollars a year.

We have seen creative ways around this over the years, like the Kaltech reusable photocatalytic filter and the Neoplants bioengineered houseplant. Neoplants was back this year at CES with a new subscription of Power Drops that help your regular house plants remove toxic pollutants.

The Eliza Air Purifier from Origen Air combines a “Super Plant” designed to metabolize VOCs with a separate HEPA filter that traps dust, pollen and other particles. That filter does need to be replaced every 2-4 months.

Watervation is a Korean startup working on a new technology to “wash” the air using just water to purify the air from pollutants like formaldehyde, acetic acid and ammonia. The team drove to Los Angeles overnight during CES to get some real-time data purifying the air near the blazing fires and the results looked impressive. 

Technology gets more and more personal

We continue to be fascinated with digital health and wellness tech and have seen people take more and control of their health with things like Vivoo home urine tests and Withings medical monitoring devices.

This year one of our favorites was the Eli Health Hormometer. They have developed an easy-to-use in-home test for cortisol levels, an important stress indicator that is traditionally expensive and hard to order from your personal doctor. 

While we are big fans of monitoring our health, some things feel just a little bit too personal and we will never be reviewing them. One of the more popular booths was Handy, and I got as far as trying to scan the QR code and got a little uncomfortable when it wanted me to give it permission to use my motion sensor. 

We also got a close up demonstration of the bebird EarSight Flow, headphones that wash your ear canal while you watch on your phone thanks to the high-resolution camera.

Healthy Aging

Senior Tech continues to be a growth area at CES and this year the AARP booth was larger than ever. It had a huge theater, a pickleball court, and a large companion space filled with small companies demonstrating their solutions.

One of the most impressive things we saw in the AARP booth was an AI powered facial scanning solution from Hibiscus Health. With just a quick face scan, it can tell you if you have warning signs of diabetes, hypertension and other heart issues. It was frighteningly accurate. 

Outside of the AARP booth we saw dozens of over-the-counter hearing aids, too many to count, as well as some great new innovations like the super-realistic Jennie robotic lap dog and the Lotus Ring to give seniors a super easy way to control their smart homes. 

Everything Old is New Again

Now that we are established veterans of CES, we are starting to see the cycles repeat themselves. Not only in the smart home, but in other areas as well. 

Wearables

I remember when Google Glass first launched and it was the talk of CES, then it crashed hard when people realized how creepy it was. 

The concept didn’t completely go away, and over the years it’s morphed to more business use cases and certainly Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality have continued to grow in popularity, from Oculus to Apple Vision and beyond. This year at CES smart glasses were back in a big way and I saw so many of them in our time at the show. I’m still not especially interested, but they certainly look better, have longer battery life and more interesting applications. 

While not smart glasses per se, I did love the Form Smart Swim 2 Goggles that include a display inside to show you real time stats, heart rate, swim workouts, and my favorite feature, a compass to help you swim straighter in the open water. They aren’t new, but they have already improved since their first version with a streamlined design and an integrated heart rate sensor.

Back when I was working at Intel in 2014, our CEO demonstrated a smart shirt in his keynote at CES, which had embedded sensors that transmitted heart rate and other biometric data over Bluetooth. It was a neat prototype to show what was possible but not anywhere close to a finished product. 

This year, we saw a smart shirt from Voormi called Mij (pronounced Me) that has finally made something realistic. It’s a nice athletic wear shirt with temperature and humidity sensors that come together to measure the wearer’s thermal load index – which is not something I have ever thought about but according to the company is an important health metric. What I liked most about it is that it’s not terribly expensive (under $100) and you can wash it in a machine like any other sports wear. 

Smart Home

In our space, we saw a few other products that certainly feel new for 2025 but we had seen before.

Multi-functional Microwaves/Range Hoods

At CES 2019, GE Appliances by Haier demonstrated a smart range hood that they called the Kitchen Hub. It had a huge beautiful Android Screen with apps and they envisioned that you would watch movies, get your recipes and communicate with friends and family. For a time it was our most popular video on our channel.

The next year they demonstrated a newer model that made the concept even more useful by adding a microwave, with a screen on the door. Occasionally we still get comments asking when and where to buy this.

At CES this year we saw LG’s version of this concept. It was very elegant and had a lot of thoughtful improvements, like adding cameras underneath the microwave so you can film yourself for cooking videos. We still think it’s a great idea and hope it makes it to market this time. 

Multi-functional smoke detectors

At CES in 2021 (it was virtual that year), one of our favorite products were the multi-functional smoke detectors from OwlHome. Beyond just detecting smoke and carbon monoxide, they include radar motion sensors and temperature/humidity sensors so they can be used for lots of different applications, including home security. We thought it was really smart to have sensors all over the house to make your home even smarter, and even better if they were connected to power so you don’t have to worry about changing the batteries. OwlHome did eventually bring these to market and you can buy them on their website.

This year Gentex, the maker of HomeLink – those buttons integrated in your car so you can open your garage or gate, was demonstrating smart smoke and CO detectors called PLACE. These take the concept a bit further by customizing the smoke detectors for individual rooms, like the kitchen, living room or a kid’s bedroom. It’s an interesting idea and it appears they are primarily working with builders and home integrators to bring it to market.

Multi-functional outlets

We have always thought that there should be sensors in every room of the house and a natural place to put them is at the outlet, since there is (almost) always power there. Controllable smart outlets have been around forever, but in 2019 Swidget was the first company we saw to really start customizing them with different modules – like Z-Wave controllers, USB ports, cameras, and air quality monitors. 

This year one of our favorite devices was the InvisOutlet that packs all the sensors onto the face plate – including temperature, humidity, occupancy, motion as well as a built-in nightlight. With all these sensors and tons of ecosystem compatibility, you can really take your smart home automations to a new level. We do think though that the wall switch may be a better place for some of the sensors. 

Smart Home Control Panels

We were early adopters of the Wink Relay – a smart home control panel we installed in the place of a two-gang outlet in our house to control all our smart home devices with a touch panel. That Wink Relay was super clunky – it was basically an android panel that you wired into the wall and was slow to respond and we eventually abandoned it.

Over the years we’ve seen smart home panels come and go. Of course they have always been in the higher-end smart homes but for DIY users they’ve ranged from the ambitious and elegant Brilliant Panel to the Amazon Echo Show 21” smart display, or just iPad or Android Tablets that have been repurposed with software dashboards to control devices. 

This year it seems almost every smart home vendor has a smart panel. We saw panels from old favorites like Shelly and Aqara as well as from startups in Eureka Park like the Oval from IrvineI and the Tap from Tweke in the UK. We still think these are a great idea, for at least some rooms in your home. And with sensors, displays and AI they can be even more useful. And almost all of them work with Matter so they should have great compatibility right out of the box. 

Matter finally mainstream

Speaking of Matter, it really feels like in 2025 that the smart home standard has hit its stride in the smart home market. We’ve been hopeful about it for a while, but frankly for the last couple of years we found it still hard to configure Matter-compatible devices and add them to our smart home and have yet to see the real promise of plug and play for the general consumer. 

But in 2025 it seems like all the hard work of the Connectivity Standards Alliance is starting to pay off and Matter-compatibility could be a given for many new smart home products. This year there was even a Matter-enabled refrigerator from Bosch on display. 

The Z-Wave protocol which used to dominate CES is still around and continues to innovate. The alliance hosted a semi-private ballroom with member demos and fireside chats. We are especially excited to test out the first products using Z-Wave Long Range – that allows for connectivity as much as 1.5 miles away and up to a 10-year battery life. 

Since we use smart home hubs that include Z-Wave we can use both Matter and Z-Wave devices together in our home, but we wonder if new users will continue to buy Z-wave products, especially since hubs like Samsung SmartThings Station and Homey Pro mini do not include Z-wave.

Solutions Focus in the Smart Home

Fierce competitors Samsung and LG always have two of the largest booths at CES and they have both really started to integrate smart home and AI throughout. This year, Samsung didn’t even have a separate television display in their booth. Televisions were there, certainly, but they were all part of the solution story in the home. Everything else was about making your home life easier, almost everything powered by their smart home platform, SmartThings.

In the LG booth, we got to see the beautiful display of OLED Transparent TVs we were craving, but we were also happy to see our friends from Homey with a dedicated section to their smart home hubs and ecosystem including their new entry-level Homey Pro mini. LG acquired an 80 percent stake in Homey last July so this was the first time they were included in the overall LG story at CES. We got a new LG dishwasher when we got home and were happy that we can now see it in the Homey app too. Who knew that having a smart dishwasher would be so fun?

AI is understood

For the last couple of years AI has been a hot topic at CES and this year was no exception. While AI is still certainly an overused term, it felt less ridiculous this year. Either that or I am just so used to hearing it now that I take it for granted that every product includes it.

Smart Home Influencers Unite

By far our favorite part of CES the last couple of years has been connecting with the other creators in our space. This year we had a wonderful influencers dinner sponsored by one of our favorite smart home companies, Zooz. Making videos week after week can be a lonely business so it is great to chat with other smart home geeks like us and compare notes.

Conclusion

While the innovations year to year may feel incremental to us, when we compare the smart home industry to where it was five or ten years ago it’s amazing to see all the progress. We look forward to seeing what 2025 brings!