Zones are an incredibly important part of the smart home. They are a core part of the models that enable advanced features to be delivered simply. A zone is not simply a room, although it could be. A zone could be a part of a room or a collection of rooms. Our models support the concept of 'nested zones' (i.e. zones within zones) and enables context and attributes to be inherited by parent or child zones. This forms the core of our advanced occupancy and presence model.
Everything within our contextual smart home resides within a zone. This means we can infer much more powerful things from the basic elements, for example virtual sensors enable our Home Control System to just know things like the average house temperature.
An 'HCS' zone is used to model internal system elements of our Home Control System.
We don't just model zones and rooms inside our home. The surrounding area is a core part of its understanding and our smart home features extend well outside the physical walls of our home. This currently includes the following zones:
An in addition, we then have the 'Outside' zone, which encompasses anything else outside of these defined zones. This is great for modelling environmental aspects of the smart home, such as the 'Outside Temperature'.
As well as modelling zones we also model features of zones such as occupancy, occupancy and presence and activity.
