Smart house, intelligent home, connected home and smart home ![]() There are overlaps and more standards out there which really are used in various contexts, including home automation – but not solely.īy way of an example: as Jean Commeignes also eloquently explains in our interview on lighting and room control, the concept of a room – and thus the used technologies and standards – stretches beyond rooms in a smart home context and combines a range of room control functions which you can find at home, in a hotel lobby, in an office meeting room and, as you can imagine, also in rooms and similar spaces in any other environment: warehouses, smart factories, you name it. You might find them in even larger buildings and in an Industry 4.0 context as well, albeit it integrated with other standards. ![]() You might also find them in a smart building automation system for buildings that are larger than the average home as this building automation example shows. You will find some of the many mentioned standards in the high-end segment of the home automation world, for instance with regards to that aspect of light and room control which is part of the smart home automation ecosystem. It was joined in the eighties by platforms/protocols such as LonWorks and CEBus (not the same as C-Bus). You can even go way back further in time to the seventies when the X10 home automation communication protocol was launched and enabled remote control of, among others, lamps. Standards and protocols which are used in a small residential building automation, home automation and lighting and room control context such as KNX, C-BUS or DALI bus technologies and wireless EnOcean exist since a long time as well, in many cases far over a decade.Įven Z-Wave and Zigbee are over a decade old. The emphasis needs to be on how the connected home can helps solve daily tasks rather than just being a novelty collection of devices and apps (Jessica Ekholm, research director at Gartner) Home automation: around and evolving since the eighties To illustrate this fact let’s look at some of the existing standards, technologies, functions and realities in two different areas, home automation with its increasingly importance of ‘smaller’ building management systems and small building automation on one hand and the smart home ‘segment’ as it’s often understood in the sense of connected appliances, remote controls and, today, IoT-enabled appliances at home on the other hand. ![]() Home automation and smart homes – roots and realities Home automation, an essential part of a smart home, and even the concept and reality of a smart or intelligent home as such go back to long before the term Internet of Things was even coined. In this article we look at smart home and home automation realities and evolutions as they are out there, will soon be out there or have been out there since quite some time. The next wave is already visible as home automation gets integrated with, for example, energy management with solar panels or even EV chargers and, thus, connections to smart grids, beyond smart metering.įor a taste of what’s coming, do note how smart homes inevitably will fit in a context of smart cities and communities as well with multiple domains meeting each other (entertainment, remote health, security, energy efficiency, remote work at home and the classics such as comfort with lighting control, heating, ventilation, air conditioning, audio/video control, shutter control, you name it). And smart speakers have paved the way for a higher level of adoption whereby consumers want more and go for more integrated systems. Over the past few years, there has been quite some hype around all sorts of smart home labeled products and future home scenarios, yet the winners are gradually becoming more visible. The concept is evolving as home automation in the classic sense meets an increasing range of products. Smart homes can mean many different things to many different people. Unfortunately, it’s still a bit the Wild West with all different standards used by different vendors, but, as per usual, in the end, interoperability, integration and open standards will prevail. As the Internet of Things (IoT) is increasingly being used for smart homes, traditional and proven home automation standards such as KNX are integrated into ever more solutions and applications. ![]() The world of home automation and the smart home is changing and converging.
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