i3 - January/February 2017 - 28

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28

JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2017

The Smart Home:
Are We There Yet?
By Simon Forrest

interconnected standards; the smart home
reduces to a set of disparate services
tethered to a smartphone. And that's not
very smart!
And service providers must also benefit
through knowledge of their products and
services or up-sell of value-added services
previously unavailable to the customer
(e.g. smart security, geo-fenced features
from smartphone, etc.). As an example if an
electricity supplier can dim the lights by 10
percent and save on consumer energy bills
while simultaneously reducing electricity
consumption, they may avoid building

another power station. That's where the
"smart money" is.
The smart home needs new business
models, similar to those needed for IoT/
M2M. We must identify new ways to
monetise services to derive revenues
beyond existing subscription and
advertising models. We know all the
data reaches the "cloud" eventually, so
new business models will allow service
providers to publish data between
clouds, and charge fees for exchange of
information deemed useful for services
provided by other vendors.
I T I S I N N O VAT I O N

HARRY CAMPBELL/THEISPOT

or years, we've been hearing
about the "smart home" but
we are not quite there yet in
consumer homes. When will we actually
live in smart homes?
First, what is a "smart home"? It's a home
in which most products and services
are inter-connected, and the underlying
technology makes intelligent decisions
to manage those services for the benefit
of the consumer and service operator.
The technologies and communication
standards are now reasonably mature.
We also are beginning to see
deployments of smart home solutions in
verticals from disparate vendors. However
the "smartness" in a smart home will only
come once vendors share data from each
of the individual vertical market segments.
Success requires collaboration and new
business models.
Ultimately consumers must benefit or
they will not embrace the smart home
concept. Consumers are confused over
which elements of a smart home offer
the most value. Smart home appliances
are still expensive. Even smaller items
such as networked light bulbs, smart
thermostats, door and window locks,
and smart electricity sockets are not
attractively priced.
Several "smart home starter kits" can
cost several hundred dollars. Adding
more sensors is prohibitively expensive,
so homeowners often abandon their
plans to expand the system. Once the
components become lower priced
the industry will see true smart home
solutions, and applications that benefit
consumers' lifestyles.
One big challenge is the proprietary
nature of smart home solutions - there
is a lack of defined standards and device
models. Standards must unify to ensure
compatibility between devices and
remove the confusion for consumers.
Those devices need to communicate with
a centralized smart hub within the home,
which then relays that information to other
devices on the network and also to the
cloud where most of the data processing
will be achieved.
If vendors don't agree on a set of
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