HOME AUTOMATION | EVERYTHING YOU SHOULD KNOW
Home automation or Domotics is designing automation for a home to control various useful functions like lighting, entertainment systems, appliances, and climate. A home with automation is known as a smart home or smart house. Home automation also includes other high tech functions like home security in terms of alarm systems and access control. Home devices have become an important part of the Internet of Things (“IoT”), they are used in connection with the internet.
What makes up a home automation system? It is simply a connection of controlled devices to a central hub, also known as a “gateway”. The home automation system has a user interface for control which uses either tablet or desktop computers, a web interface, a mobile phone application, or wall-mounted terminals, and they can also be accessible through the internet off-site.
With the fast growth and development of home automation products, there are now lots of competing vendors. Although, there are only a few of them that are acceptable worldwide based on the standards of the industry. There is also a heavy fragmentation in the smart home space already. Manufacturers do withhold documentation and litigation so that they avoid independent implementations.
In 2013, the home automation was already worth US$5.77 billion and there is a prediction that by the year 2020, it will reach a market value of US$12.81 billion.
How it all started
Home automation didn’t just start in this last decade or this century, it has been around for a while now. Let’s say it has been accumulating and in the developmental process. Home automation all started with the labor-saving machines.
In the 1900s, many home appliances became viable when electric power distribution was introduced. This particular improvement led to the technological advancement of gas-powered appliances or self-contained electric appliances to dishwashers, water heaters, sewing machines, clothes dryers, and electric washing machines.
Then in the year 1975, there was the development of the first general-purpose home automation system technology, known as X10. The home automation network technology, X10 is useful to electronic devices as a communication protocol. X10 majorly uses electric power transmission wiring for both control and signaling, while the signals include radio frequency bursts of digital data, and it is still the most widely used.
There were more X10 products by 1978, such as a lamp module, an appliance module, and a 16 channel command console. Then not too long after that, there came the first X10 timer and the wall switch. According to ABI Research, in the year 2012, there was about 1.5 million home automation systems installation in the United States alone. Then at the end of the year 2018, according to the research from Statista, there will be more than 45 million smart home devices installed in the U.S. homes.
Home Automation Technologies and Applications
Lighting system: this is a network that is considered smart and enables the communication between different lighting system inputs and outputs, with the use of one or more central computing devices.
Heating, ventilation and Air conditioning systems (HVAC): with these kinds of systems you can have total remote control of your home energy monitors via the internet through the means of easy-to-use and friendly user interface.
Control of appliances and integration with a smart meter and smart grid, hence, you get to enjoy using high solar panel output to operate washing machines during the day.
Occupancy-aware control systems: You can detect the occupancy of your home with the help of environmental sensors and smart meters. With proper integration into your home automation system, so that it can trigger automatic responses through devices like CO2 sensors. They are very useful for energy applications and making comfort applications.
Home Security and Robots: security and surveillance are gradually becoming automated rather than traditional security. You can now integrate a home security system with the home automation system to provide outstanding services like remote surveillance of home security cameras via the internet. It is also possible to access control and automate locking of all the house windows and doors.
Home automation systems for the disabled and elderly.
Baby and Pet Care: for instance, tracking the movements of pets and babies, with the control of pet’s access rights.
Smoke and CO detectors, and leak detection.
Indoor positioning systems (IPS).
Connected Cooking and Smart Kitchen: you start using voice control devices such as Google Home or Amazon Alexa to your kitchen appliances.
Air Quality control: these devices are useful for monitoring the air quality at home and the pollution level in the city. You can also use them to create a map of the pollution such as Air Quality Egg.
Implementations of Home Automation Systems
There were two major concerns raised by consumers according to Consumer Reports in a review of home automation systems.
In a review of home automation devices, Consumer Reports found two main concerns for consumers:
• A Wi-Fi network connected to the internet can be vulnerable to hacking.
• Technology is still in its infancy, and consumers could invest in a system that becomes abandonware. In 2014, Google bought the company selling the Revolv Hub home automation system, integrated it with Nest, and in 2016 shut down the servers Revolv Hub depended on, rendering the hardware useless.
In 2011, Microsoft Research found that home automation could involve a high cost of ownership, the inflexibility of interconnected devices, and poor manageability.
Historically, systems have been sold as complete systems where the consumer relies on one vendor for the entire system including the hardware, the communications protocol, the central hub, and the user interface. However, there are now open hardware and open-source software systems that can be used instead of or with proprietary hardware.
Criticism and controversies
Home automation suffers from platform fragmentation and lack of technical standards a situation where the variety of home automation devices, in terms of both hardware variations and differences in the software running on them, makes the task of developing applications that work consistently between different inconsistent technology ecosystems hard. Customers may hesitate to bet their IoT future on proprietary software or hardware devices that use proprietary protocols that may fade or become difficult to customize and interconnect.
The nature of home automation devices can also be a problem for security since patches to bugs found in the core operating system often do not reach users of older and lower-price devices. One set of researchers say that the failure of vendors to support older devices with patches and updates leaves more than 87% of active devices vulnerable.
Conclusively, all the negative criticisms can still be worked on and it shouldn’t stop anyone from enjoying the outstanding features of home automation. There are many more great technologies coming up and it only gets better.