Institute For The Future

Getting smarter about smart homes

EDN has an article about the movement among builders of home automation systems to develop common standards and protocols. Sounds intensely boring?

Okay, in a way it is. The development of industry-wide common standards is never an occasion for a big corporate PR campaign. At most, they get talked up as examples of how Company X is working with Company Y to make end-users' lives easier.

One of the most important developments within RFID in the last few years hasn't been anything strictly technical, but the emergence of the EPC standard. RFID has been used in lots of different applications in the last 20 years, and it's been an amazingly uncoordinated evolution: two years ago, Larry Kellam (P&G's main RFID guy, and now an RFID consultant) told me that there were 120 different standards covering everything from tag design to encoding to reader-tag communication protocols-- enough standards to hinder growth of the industry, not to mention creating headaches for users. It was a big thing when one maker of highway toll RFID got together with a maker of garage access RFID, to make it possible for the same tags to work on the highway and garages-- in one city in Texas.

A similar riot of standards, non-interoperable components, and non-communicating systems live in our houses. And just as multiple, competing standards have come to serve as an impediment to the growth of other technologies and systems, so are people in the housing industry realizing that they're going to hold back evolution of the smart home. As the article puts it:

 

Stuck in a highly fragmented industry, building-automation designers are formulating new initiatives to provide interoperability, simplify management, conserve energy, provide security, and reduce costs.

Although engineers have envisioned and implemented many Jetsons-like conveniences throughout the home, factory, and office, most end users are reluctant to pay extra for the hardware and software necessary to simplify mundane tasks. For example, subsystems to enable voice controls, automatically feed the pets, or create lighting or entertainment scenes when you walk through the door are available today, yet they appeal to only a small audience. In areas having high consumer interest, such as security or energy conservation, the lack of compatible products makes it difficult to devise a fully integrated system. Recognizing these industry problems, product manufacturers have proposed new initiatives, updated standards, and revised communications protocols that promise to accelerate the acceptance of smart-building technology.

Smart-building technology relies on distributed sensors, remotely controllable actuators, device networking, and decision-making software to coordinate and optimize building subsystems, such as those for security, the environment, information transfer, and safety. In a truly integrated building-automation system, any subsystem may use components and sensors. For example, an open window is important to both the security subsystem and the heating or air-conditioning function. Likewise, temperature sensors could detect a fire or signal the need for routine maintenance. Unlike today's stand-alone building systems, this type of data reuse requires components and subsystems that share and store sensor information.

 

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