What Makes a Truly Smart Home?

A truly smart home is one that is able to act intuitively and automatically.

14:34 22 November 2017

it is able to anticipate and respond appropriately based on learned lifestyle patterns and real-time interaction. It is also able to increase awareness, comfort, convenience, cost and energy-savings. So, how close are we in building such a home? Paige Leuschner, a research analyst with Navigant Research, thinks that we are not even close.

 

Leuschner said that right now the smart home market is focusing on increasing the adoption of connected devices, which provides a framework of sensors that transmit data about the home and its occupants. However, many of these devices are plagued with interoperability issues, including lack of communication between devices due to numerous communicating technologies, standards and protocols. In order to make these devices work, users must still control them using multiple apps. Also, many available devices in the market today still lack the advanced functionality that is expected of them.

 

Data privacy and security also remains to be a huge problem in the fields of Internet of Things (IoT) and smart home. Customers are increasingly becoming wary of technologies that they feel are collecting data and spying on them. Until these issues are resolved, mass adaption of smart home may never be realised.