STEPHEN LEWIS checks out a Big Brother-style futuristic home.

FROSTY the talking fridge isn't backward in coming forward with her opinions. You have hardly begun to think about what to have for dinner before she is ready with suggestions. "I like the look of cheese omelette," she says, sounding like a cross between a strict young schoolmistress and a sexy Stephen Hawking.

A bossy fridge is just one of the surprises in store as you walk through the doors of the Responsive Home. There's also a sink that moves (apparently of its own volition), photos that come to life, and a TV that turns into a picture frame at the touch of a button.

Then there are the video cameras - which could give the Big Brother house a run for its money - and a hidden Big Brother-style back room from which every movement of the house's occupants can be recorded and observed.

No, you haven't stumbled on to the set of some mysterious new hi-tech reality gameshow. This is York University's newest laboratory: an 'ordinary' home equipped with state-of-the-art technology where researchers aim to find out which home technology works - and which doesn't.

"Many home technologies have failed because they do not take account of people's real needs, particularly their social needs," says Professor Andrew Monk, director of CUHTec, the Centre for Usable Home Technology, which was launched yesterday by Baroness Dean. "CUHTec is set to change that."

It is indeed. The centre has been set up with the help of funding from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation.

It brings together experts from the university's departments of psychology, computer science and electronics with other interested users and suppliers - everybody from IT companies to social services organisations. The responsive home is one of its key projects.

Inside these four walls, the most exciting technology around is to be rigorously road-tested by the most unforgiving of users - ordinary people.

It is, says Prof Monk, all about understanding what people want and need home technology for. There are plenty of other 'smart' homes around to demonstrate what is possible: but a lot of it is just flashy technology for its own sake.

What makes York's Responsive Home different is that it aims to find out what technology is going to be useful.

There seems little doubt that Frosty the talking fridge could be. Based on technology developed by York software firm Lexicle, Frosty is a pleasant-looking young woman whose virtual image appears on a screen built into the fridge's front door.

Touch the right panel on the screen, and she can tell you which of the goods stored inside have passed their sell-by date and which need to be used up quickly. She can suggest tasty meals made using the fridge's contents, and even help draw up shopping lists.

"If she notices you are ordering more milk, for example, and you have already got four pints, she can tell you," says Prof Monk. This could be useful for someone who is getting on in years and whose memory is beginning to fail, for example. "It can be a real problem," says Prof Monk. "There could be several pints curdling away inside."

Many of the technologies being road-tested in the Responsive Home could, like Frosty, benefit elderly or disabled people who wish to continue living independently in their own home but need help to do so.

The moving sink is another example. Photographer Mike Tipping discovered how it works by accident as he was photographing Frosty. Leaning against the sink, he suddenly found it was, well, sinking. He had managed to depress a small panel linked to an electronic circuit that causes the sink to lower itself until it is at a height usable by someone in a wheelchair. Touching another switch causes it to automatically rise again.

It is not only people in wheelchairs that may find the moving sink useful, Prof Monk points out. "You might get a child doing the washing up," he says hopefully. "You never know."

The sink also has another hi-tech feature: a mixer tap with a built-in thermometer, so that no matter how hot the water in the tank gets, it will always be adjusted when it comes out of the tap so that it can't burn you. A useful fail-safe device for people with learning difficulties or older people with dementia who are living independently, Prof Monk says.

There's also a microwave with a built-in safety, so that it automatically cuts off if any metal - a spoon left in a cup of coffee that's being heated up, for example - is put inside. In the bedroom and bathroom are other safety gadgets - alarms that automatically summon help if the floor floods, or if the wearer takes a fall.

Those both use relatively simple technology, Prof Monk says - although it is no less useful for that. More sophisticated is a bed occupancy detector. It hasn't been installed in the home yet, but it would work by automatically switching on lights if an older person got up in the middle of the night to go to the loo - and would then summon help if they had not returned to bed after a pre-set time. "Many older people fall over when they get up to go to the loo in the middle of the night," explains Prof Monk.

Not all of the technology being tested out here is intended to help elderly or frail people who want to continue living in their own homes, however. Some will just make ordinary everyday life that bit easier - or more fun.

In the dining room is a modernistic glass and steel table with a simple black cloth laid on it. Lay ordinary photographs on this, and they magically come to 'life', broadcasting the sounds that were happening when the photograph was taken - the clink of glasses and background conversation in the case of a restaurant photo, for example. It is done with the help of camera technology that enables a brief 'snatch' of sound to be recorded at same time a photo is being taken, and is triggered by a wall-mounted automatic sensor suspended in the ceiling above the table that 'recognises' photos and triggers the playing of the appropriate recording.

In the sitting room is a TV set that, at the touch of a zapper, can be transformed into a wall-mounted picture frame. It's a simple idea where, once the TV is put onto standby mode, it displays favourite photos or other images.

It is a classic case of designers reacting to people saying what they wanted, Prof Monk says. "They said 'the TV is so ugly when it is switched off'," he says. "This is a solution."

The sitting room is the heart of the house for another reason. It is this room that is wired, Big Brother-style, to a suite of observation monitors in the 'hidden' observation room. There researchers, Ph.D student Sian Lindley among them, will analyse people's behaviour as they use the home's technology.

CUHTec researchers also go into people's own homes to see how they make use of technology there, says Prof Monk.

The Responsive Home, however, enables them to do something more: to demonstrate the very latest technology, and then study what real people make of it under lab conditions.

Ultimately, it should mean better, more useful, technologies evolving.

"For older people, it might mean that they can live longer in their home," says Prof Monk.

"For everyone else, it may mean they are less likely to be intimidated by the technology that is being developed for their homes."

Which sounds good. It's just a pity the Responsive Home wasn't around when someone was designing the first programmable video recorder.

Can you give me a hand, anybody?

Updated: 09:36 Thursday, July 15, 2004