Smart Homes Business



Smart Homes Business

Business Rules for Smart Homes

The IT revolution has certainly not bypassed our homes. A lot of our home devices and appliances have evolved from manual contraptions to electrical powered machines to smart electronic web-enabled devices. Since most electronic devices come with Internet connectivity a Jetsons like residence seems possible in the near future. And as electricity bills start to mount, fed by more electronic equipment and rising energy prices one would expect the home-automation industry would work on making your home smarter and more efficient. Optimizing your energy usage, facilitating easy information access throughout your house, creating an optimal home climate, securing your home perimeter, scheduled window blinds, lights coming up automatically when entering a dark room, etc.

But while individual home devices have become smarter over time the true benefit still falls short since they are not really connected. The sum of all these smart devices have not resulted in a smarter living environment. Most devices act as point solutions in the home without much knowledge about the rest of the home environment. But being aware of all other electronic systems, devices and appliances is important because a house and its residents form an ecosystem of time and location based functionalities and interdependencies. The problem is in bringing an ever larger variety of devices with different ways of networking (wired, WiFi, 3G, Z-wave, X-10) and protocols from different vendors, together under one interface and control.

A few weeks ago Microsoft released a progress update on their project HomeOS that wants to address the smart home . HomeOS aims to be the smart home operating system that easily connects, integrates, manages and controls all kinds of electronic devices inside the home. A smart device-agnostic environment that integrates and orchestrates devices and appliances will certainly deliver on convenience, efficiency and control in our home. The main issue here might not be creating the technology platform and infrastructure. The barrier to adoption will most certainly be people. The real question is: are we ready for it?

While smarter use of smarter devices seems like a smart idea, the majority of people will not be able or willing to cope with the infrastructure behind it or pay for unclear benefits. For this reason the networked home so far has not taken off: you are either a geek spending too much time to install, integrate and manage your own network, or you outsource the work to a specialized company paying too much for a vertical closed solution or a custom made monolithic system. Most people are not technology geeks and while there are a lot of vendors selling home automation products they do come with a steep price tag.

Nevertheless more and more sophisticated actuators and sensors find their way into information devices and home appliances adding functionality and control. Connecting all these devices sensors, actuators and appliances is usually referred to as the Internet of Things (IoT). Home automation is just another environment where we will see the IoT ...