Multiple Used Remote Control

Remote controls, for TV, DVD, VCR, DVR, sound box system, family theater, air conditioner, light, computer, telephone, door, car, and so on, are in everywhere and every family. And the state of art household electronic equipment has less and less control buttons and relies on remote control more and more. Remote control as a tool makes our everyday life easier and more comfortable, but at the mean time, it could be an exhausted work to find a specific remote control in a big house. My question is how many remote controls do we need to keep and manage in our everyday life? Do these remote controls really help us to make our life easier or make us their slaves? And according to my question, my intervention should be that we should be able to use one remote control to control all the electronic machines in our house, and I would like to call it a multiple used remote control.

I observed my family members’ behavior in my home. And get some conclusions here:

1. The main function keys, such as power, stop, pause, fast play, skip, up- arrow and down-arrow buttons, are on almost every remote control handhold. Some of keys changes a little in function when they control different terminals. For example, the key button with the picture of “>>” is a fast play button on a TV remote control, but is fast temperature up-change button (the temperature of a thermometer would go up 2 degree when users click the button one time) when it is on an air conditioner remote control.
2. Remote control is very easy to use or at least easy to learn how to use. Even my eighty-year old grandmother and five-year old nephew who never go to school are able to use remote controls to watch TV, play music and adjust the inside temperature.
3. It is often happened that people cannot find where a remote control is when they want to use it immediately. Sometimes even it is at somewhere that seems can easily be found by people, it still cannot quickly find by that person who want it. And also people can find several other different remote controls but not the one they want to find or use.
4. Sometimes people accidentally or intendedly use wrong remote control to try to do something, and hope that the wrong one can work.
5. Sometimes people give up to find a remote control if they still have no idea about where it is after looking for several minutes.
6. People get a bad mood if they cannot do something only because that they failed to find a remote control.

Based on above observations, it is very easy to manage if we can only use one remote control to control all kinds of household electronic machines. And if we can do this, maybe we can keep two or three same remote controls in our house to be standby, and do not have to spend lots of our time on looking for a remote control anymore.