What are the consumer trends of 2015? Well, the New Year has yet to arrive, but Ericsson has released its annual “10 hot consumer trends for 2015 and beyond” report that takes into account the opinions of consumers from around the world. From their responses, the multinational communications and tech services company has developed its yearly list of the latest trends that should sweep the globe in the next 12 months and will inform technological progress through the rest of the decade.

Ericsson's ConsumerLab global research program has interviewed consumers who live in 40 different countries and who represent more than 1 billion people across the planet. Their interviews with people from Johannesburg, London, Mexico City, New York, Moscow, San Francisco, Sâo Paulo, Shanghai, Sydney, and Tokyo, among many other places, have made the “10 hot consumer trends” list possible.

What researchers found covers a lot of technological ground. Regarding multimedia, they note that consumers will stream more video every week than they will watch on broadcast television. People also want to be more connected than ever within their own homes. The report shows that they seek sensors that will alert them to water and electricity issues as well as sensors that indicate when loved ones have arrived or left their own homes. People are even ready to use wearables that can allow them to communicate with each other directly through their thoughts. They reportedly think this type of interaction will be commonplace by 2020.

Consumers say they want to be more aware of their daily surroundings; they insist that technology such as traffic volume maps, energy use applications, and apps that monitor water use in real time will also be commonplace by 2020. Smartphones are paving the way for many new technologies, and consumers say they are ready for smartphones apps to help them rent spare rooms and appliances, replace their actual purses with digital purses, and provide instant sharing of financial information with their banks. Perhaps the most telling feature that could underlie these trends: 56 percent of smartphone owners say they want all communication completed through the Internet to be encrypted.

These same consumers also indicate that access to cloud services such as activity meters and health-based applications could help them live longer lives. A whopping 64 percent of consumers think that consumer robots that help with household chores will be commonplace by 2020. And finally, consumers believe that it is not them, but their children, who will drive development within the Internet. It is children who may expect everything in their physical world to be connected to the Internet by the time they become adults.