Birds-Eye.Net The Potentially Smart Home

The "Potentially" Smart Home
A huge market looking for a console to manage it.

By: Bruce Bahlmann - Contributing Author (your feedback is important to us!)

In today’s increasingly connected world there exists the potential to build intelligence within the everyday home through the collective assembly of network-aware devices. The resulting collective of devices uses environmental data, available media, and sensor data along with access to cyberspace to enable a host of smart applications aimed at providing ultra convenience, security, entertainment, and energy optimization to homes. While automation within the home is far from a new concept, recent advances have resulted in simplified installation and affordability which are key milestones for mass market appeal.

The market for equipment with the potential to be part of the smart home spans several lucrative sectors shown in Table 1.0. At this point smart home solutions tend to address specific automation activities within each of these markets. For example, whole home remote controls manage a home entertainment system available from multiple rooms and demand side control devices control consumption of heavy use appliances (e.g. water heater, HVAC).

Market Sector:	Inclusive:	Size:
Home Security Market	Alarms, sensors, security camera, monitoring systems	$16 billion
Home Networking Market	Media networking	17.1 billion by 2008 (In-Stat/MDR)
Home Entertainment Market	Media PCs, AV players, TVs, speakers, digital receivers, cable & satellite boxes	$411 billion by 2010 (BCC)
Home Energy Optimization Market	Electricy, gas, heating oil, propane, water	$110 billion spent by US homes on energy (US Govt)

Smart home is being influenced by growing consumer awareness of ways they can cut their home energy consumption (e.g. home depot sold 50 million compact fluorescents in 2006 and Walmart plans to sell 100 million compact fluorescents in 2008). Beyond these steps, targeting big ticket energy items like upgrading furnaces, water heaters, and refrigerators to energy star appliances while managing the use of these appliances during times of need is beginning to yield interesting cross-service applications such as those triggered off GPS proximity of a person’s smart phone to their home that allows adjustment of creature comforts or queuing up of days alerts, events, and recorded media.

With 39% return rates on home networking equipment, Consumer Electronics is well aware of the need to create devices that are increasingly simpler for consumers to setup and install. In the mean time, consumers can reach out to companies like FireDog, Geek Squad, Gurus2Go, and HighWired to help them setup and install more advanced equipment.

Where does the home owner go to manage their home? Do they type in some cryptic IP address like 192.168.0.1 (gateway address) or is there some other more convenient location to manage these devices? One area of potential opportunity falls in the vicinity of a common control panel for managing multiple services or applications within the home the home. The common control panel represents a choice piece of user interface real estate in terms of user interactivity and is a key device in bringing these various markets together. However, where logic would suggest that the consumer television be this device, television manufacturers are reluctant to build software applications such as this control panel. This leaves the home computer, digital set top box (STB), or potentially the home gateway as next most viable choices to provide this function.