The Contextual Smart Home

The 'contextual smart home' is a smart home where all of the collected sensor data, state information and its associated context reside in a single, logical Home Control System and are available in real-time. It essentially "sees" everything instantly, without the need for the Internet or cloud-based services and is therefore "fully context aware". This means it also possible to query and control (permissions allowing) everything connected to the contextual smart home, via any of its many user interfaces, but mostly it can just do things for you, before you need to ask, providing a luxury, zero-touch user experience.

Important aspects of the contextual smart home (including the people living in it) are modelled, so that it can make sense of what it is seeing and understand what's happening within a context framework. It is also be able to infer new things from what it is seeing. All of this enables the contextual smart home to make better decisions and to take the most appropriate action. It represents the next generation of the smart home and is the basis of intelligent assisted living.

It models all of the elements of the smart home using technology abstraction and so it is also technology agnostic. This makes it easily extensible and easy to add new features or technologies. It basically means that anyone could configure one too, there is no steep learning curve, as found with many other open-source and commercial solutions.

There are many sources of contextual data in the smart home. It could be something obvious like the mode that drives its behaviour but, it could be something more subtle, like occupancy and presence, whether it is dark outside, the local weather conditions, a device being detected on the home network or a vehicle arriving home. It may even be something as trivial as a door opening.

The key difference between most current smart homes and a contextual smart home is that it has instant access to the whole 'pool' of data (something we call "whole home context" or "fully context aware") and can infer things from it which would not be possible otherwise. The decisions it makes can be very different because of one small piece of information.

Our current smart home has 400+ sensors and devices.

Benefits

• One obvious benefit of the contextual smart home is that with all data, state, context and the decision processing being held locally, there is no dependency on the Internet for it to work. Internet services and data can be used to augment and improve how it works but this is not a necessity.
• All the data and context is stored within your home and you own it. You decide what will be shared, when and with whom. This is particularly important in telecare, assisted living and rented accommodation environments, where it may not be possible to get informed consent to share this information with third-party service providers like Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, etc. It is also important in the luxury hotel sector and celebrity homes, where privacy is critical.
• In the contextual smart home, the natural language processing and AI also reside locally and have access to the pool of information and context, meaning they can make much a more informed and intelligent response, personalising the user experience when the user is identifiable, holding a threaded conversation with retained context between requests and also do this across the various different user interfaces (both inside and outside of the home). It can do this because you are communicating with a single, 'intelligent' entity.
• Because a contextual smart home is a single, logical system, anything connected to it instantly inherits all of it's data, context and has access to all its common capabilities, whilst also contributing to the wider whole home context. This basically means you can connect any cheap, dumb sensor or appliance to make it incredibly smart.
• Local information processing results in very low latency and this then provides in a much better user experience.