Whilst on our journey to design and build our contextual smart home we have identified many reasons why people would want one and the associated resulting benefits.
Most people arrive at smart home automation with one or two specific problems in mind that they would like to solve. These are usually quite personal and specific to their home. What we have tried to do here though is to list the many reasons and benefits, whilst trying to avoid talking about the technology and specific solutions. The smart home is not about technology but what it can do for you.
We do show some real examples from our own @smartest_home, to help explain our thinking.
The smart home should be about a great user experience. The best user interface to your smart home is the one that is easiest to use, given the task at hand and your current situation. This means it may also change as your circumstances change. Using a light switch makes sense when it is close by but if your hands are full it may not be a viable option. Using voice control may be the simplest method to achieve something complex but when you are watching a movie at volume in your lounge, voice control is unlikely to work well.
Our ideal smart home interface is one that is invisible and yet knows what you want to do simply by being present. This is achievable in many situations and works regardless of your personal circumstances. This zero-touch user experience is our goal in our smart home, whenever possible.
Whatever the interface being used (touch screen display, switch, remote control, etc.), it must also be intuitive. This means it is clear how it must be used and what will happen if you use it. In addition, we want our smart home interfaces to also be timely (instantly ready to use), responsive (the resulting action happens immediately) and reliable (it always works).
The smart home is not about eliminating all of the buttons and switches in your home. In many situations it is just simpler and easier to press a light switch and if a light switch is present, people will expect it to work like normal light switches do. Part of the 'smart' in smart home is about predicting where buttons and switches should be, ensuring that the person pressing it knows what it will do and in making sure that what happens next meets their expectations.
The smart home can provide an incredible level of convenience.
It's all just really convenient!
As well as being energy efficient, a smart home is also often effortless (minimises the user interaction required). It can automate mundane and repetitive tasks. Whilst the able-bodied often take such things for granted, those with dexterity and mobility issues hugely appreciate the value of this, with the smart home supporting the concept of assisted living. You don't have to be old to appreciate this.
Our smart home understands that each person has unique needs and provides a personalised user experience to best meet them. These needs could be defined by age, height, sex, dexterity, mobility or simple personal preferences.
Part of this personalised user experience is knowing what each person is allowed and enforcing those permissions.
The contextual smart home collects vast amounts of personal data about your home and its occupants. Because it provides so many advanced features, a lot of this data is high sensitive and personal. Our view is that this should not be shared with third parties like Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, etc.
This is why we have designed our smart home solution from the outset to protect its owner's privacy. Our design is based upon the assumption that you own your smart home and all of the information that it generates and stores. The default position is that all of this data stays within your home unless you decide to share some of it with other service providers.
A smart home will intelligently monitor and control obvious things like heating and cooling, to ensure your home remains comfortable. Our smart home also monitors humidity and controls things like bathroom extractor fans to ensure bathrooms are warm, dry and condensation free. It also controls safety lighting to ensure we don't struggle to move around at night and don't get dazzled by lights being switched on automatically. Our smart home also monitors air quality to ensure we are not subjected to air-borne pollution and discomfort.
Safety is probably the main reason that most people start looking at home automation and start thinking about adding 'smartness' to their home. A benefit of the smart home is that it often makes people think about safety in their home and the steps they can take to improve it.
When it comes to safety sensors and devices in the smart home some of the key advantages are:
It is hard to convey in words alone just how much more efficient a smart home can be in terms of energy usage. The power to monitor occupancy and to intelligently control heating, lighting and appliances around you and your family results in huge improvements in efficiency (and convenience), resulting in large cost savings. In many cases there are obvious financial benefits (e.g. smart heating control enabled at a zone level) but in other cases the financial reward is more subtle.
Our contextual smart home can monitor the energy usage of individual devices and appliances and track how long they are on for. It can also automatically switch them off when they are no longer required or have been left on by mistake.
Smart home access control enables greater flexibility and peace of mind. Smart locks can be checked or operated remotely, to enable guests and tradesmen access. Technologies like NFC/RFID can be used to provide an audit trail if need be, as can keypads along with unique user PIN codes.
A reliable security system with both local and remote alarms will greatly improve the security of you home and its contents. Integrating this functionality into your smart home provides greater control and the ability to get remote alerts and take more appropriate action. Smart home components installed correctly will eliminate false alarms, hugely improving confidence in your alarm system and ensuring real alarm events are taken seriously by neighbours and the police.
Simple things like having lights on timers to make your home look occupied is a major deterrent to burglars. Adding some smarter components brings more flexible control, clocks that adjust automatically for daylight saving and light level sensing to improve efficiency and react to local weather conditions. The smart home can also automate the opening and closing of curtains and blinds, so your house looks occupied whilst away on holiday.
Knowing that you can check appliances and switch them off whilst away from home can provide peace of mind. In our smart home all of our connected devices are monitored to see how long they have been on (and off).
Being able to remotely monitor devices or get notifications and alerts on your Smartphone also provides peace of mind. Remote access to security cameras and captured images and video even more so.
Our approach to delivering a contextual smart home with a great user experience means that it is also accessible to all. Wherever possible we aim for a zero-touch user experience, which just works for everyone. Our approach of providing multiple user interfaces that work in parallel means that one of them will always work well for you, regardless of your abilities or potential impairments. The contextual smart home can work for the profoundly deaf, visually impaired and less agile. Improving quality of life for all is one of our primary goals.
A smart home will intelligently monitor and control obvious things like heating and cooling, to ensure your home remains comfortable. Our smart home also monitors humidity and controls things like bathroom extractor fans to ensure bathrooms are warm, dry and condensation free. It also controls safety lighting to ensure we don't struggle to move around at night and don't get dazzled by lights being switched on. Our smart home also monitors air quality to ensure we are not subjected to air-borne pollution and discomfort.
The smart home can monitor both the external and internal environment, measuring pollution levels, local weather conditions, carbon monoxide levels, detecting smoke, as well as obvious things like temperature and humidity. Our smart home also monitors UV levels and will soon be monitoring background radiation levels too.
We have alluded to it already but, the smart home is completely compatible with the concept of assisted living. A smart home is perfect for the elderly and vulnerable and can ensure peace of mind for both local and remote carers or relatives.
All of the benefits described above combine to enable 'assisted living for all'. As the smart home becomes more connected and more intelligent it can do more for everyone that resides within it.
Included within of our wide definition of the contextual smart home is telecare. An intelligent smart home could help people with mobility and dexterity issues live longer in their own home. It could support the elderly and vulnerable and those affected by dementia, to lead a better and more independent life.
As well as reducing your home's energy usage, the smart home can assist in reducing its environmental impact in other ways. We are researching ways to reduce water usage and maximise rainwater harvesting and grey water recycling. We are also researching how the smart home can help with local energy generation.
The smart home makes access to entertainment easier and more convenient. It simplifies the process of consuming content (film, TV, music, user generated content, etc.) throughout your home, when you want it and on the devices that you have to hand. It both improves access to 'quality' content and the quality of the content consumed, whilst enabling a personalised experience.
The smart home has to be fun! If it isn't putting a smile on your face at least once each day, then it isn't really 'smart' in our view.
If we had to summarise the benefits of the the smart home in one simple phrase, then it would be "improved quality of life". A smart home informs and educates you, improving the way you live in and changing the way you view and interact with your home. A smart home becomes a reliable and dependable friend.
If it is implemented correctly, a smart home will actually improve reliability through intelligence and efficient use of resources and devices. When you have lived in a smart home your behaviour and lifestyle adapts and you come rely on it and expect it to make your life better.
The light bulbs in our smart home are a very simple example of this. Intelligent control will optimise the time they spend on (and maybe also their brightness) and thus maximise their lifespan. This is also true for other devices and appliances controlled by our smart home.
During the summer months, our central heating system is switched off and is not generally used at all from April to October. Once a week, during these months our @smartest_home exercises our central heating to help keep the pipes clear and the pumps running smoothly, improving reliability.
If implemented correctly, the smart home is not a collection of isolated hardware and apps. The smart home has never been about simple remote control of appliances and consumer devices in our view. Smart home is about a seamless layer of intelligence that sits above the normal user interactions that experience on a daily basis.
The intelligent smart home is proactive, taking action before you realise it has happened or is even needed. It can consume external data sources (such as location, online calendars, weather forecasts, etc.) to predict future requirements and pre-empt the needs of its owners.
Our smart home collects and analyses local weather feeds and also collects data directly via our weather station. From this data it identifies potential hazards (ice, heavy rain, high winds, high UV levels, high levels of pollution, etc.) and proactively warns us of potential hazards as we leave our home.
Our technology abstraction and hybrid technology approach to delivering the contextual smart home means we can use the best technology solution for each task at hand. Best in terms of performance, reliability and cost. This means that you don't need to integrate expensive "smart" gadgets designed with one purpose in mind. Many of which have planned obsolescence to ensure you buy the latest version.
There is a better way and we think that our approach of connecting simpler, lower cost, "dumb" sensors and devices that can be easily connected is the way forward. We let the contextual smart home be the brains and everything connected to it inherits all its capabilities and smartness. Not only does this provide a much better and more powerful user experience but it also significantly reduces the cost of living in a smart home.
I was watching a TV programme called 'The World's Most Luxurious Hotels'. These are the kind of hotels where you can spend £5000 or more a night to experience the ultimate luxury stay. On the programme they asked several hotel managers to define luxury and they all said something along the lines of: "Luxury is providing something before the customer needs to ask for it."
This is one of the primary goals of the contextual smart home, which aims to deliver a zero-touch user experience when ever possible.
After all the above reasons have been considered there is still one more compelling reason why you need to live in a smart home:
When we started off down the path of home automation it was simply to better understand how we used our house and to learn from this knowledge. All of the above benefits can only be realised by understanding how you use your home and implementing a smart home solution to meet each need. An holistic view of the knowledge and learning will allow a focus on the most important needs, minimise the effort required whilst maximising the benefits and also minimise expenditure. The learning will help you decide how best to improve your current home and can even help you decide when it is time to move home.
This is a continual learning process and this is why we have always viewed the smart home as a journey and not a destination. It's a journey that we think everyone should make.
Convergence is about bringing relevant services and features within the scope of your smart home, to enable simple and easy control. It means intelligent and simple integration, to make bring things 'closer to hand' (voice, gesture, etc.). When done well, it means you don't have to think about how you interact with related elements because the logical interface is just ready and available.
Convergence is not about an 'uber app' and providing one single app to control everything. It's about have right interface for the required task and this will be one on many interfaces and types of interfaces. It has to be one that makes sense and works for each individual user.
We can think of no better example where the phrase "the whole is greater than the sum of its parts" is true than for the contextual smart home. With a whole home context approach to smart home automation, much of the hardware installed in your smart home has multiple uses, meets many needs and supports many of the above reasons for living in a smart home.
A really simple example of this in our smart home is our connected temperature sensors. These can be used to:
