## 8 Summary and Conclusions  
Smart homes are provisioned with technology that monitors the residents and supplies proactive services. The primary objectives of smart home systems are providing convenience, augmenting security, and preserving energy.  
All smart homes emphasize energy management and comfort and safety of their inhabitants. To achieve these goals, the smart home needs to be conscious of its environment. Monitoring the environment is strongly dependent on underlying sensor technologies. Furthermore, a smart home must scrutinize the sensor generated data to make decisions and required changes within the environment. This clearly demonstrates the importance of activity recognition and prediction medium in the smart home concept.  
Energy performance of smart homes requires consideration of building properties, in addition to behaviour of their occupants and state of the environment. To analyze the dynamic thermal behaviour of buildings, a suitable model needs to be selected. The grey box modelling appears to provide the most effective scheme for energy consumption management of buildings.  
There are two focused areas defined for smart homes: Users and buildings. These two areas have a strong connection with each other in energy management and inhabitants' comfort. Most energy management schemes presented in the literature rely on scheduling and shifting consumption from peak-load time to low-load time. However, to attain effective energy management, it is necessary to integrate the occupant activity and behaviour as a critical element to construct energy and comfort management (BECM) systems. In addition to occupant detection, it is necessary to predict the occupants' state to avoid loss of comfort; this poses a challenge for future research and development in the area of smart homes. Another challenge is future convergence of multiple existing IoT services to create new ones, for example car-home connectivity and home-based healthcare.  
In conclusion, it is expected that smart homes will become more and more important in the near future. This will intensify the demand for effective energy management considering the occupants' comfort. Several other challenges still need to be addressed in the context of smart homes, such as deploying efficient sensor technologies, activity recognition and prediction, methods for data storage and analysis. In addition, future smart homes will co-exist with other smart technologies and require convergence of corresponding networks and services. This clearly illustrates the multidisciplinary nature of this area and requires the involvement of number of specialists in developing future smart homes.  
All authors substantially contributed to the work presented in this paper. Conceptualization and methodology, Y.C. and P.M.; Literature review and writing--original draft preparation, B.L.; Writing--review and editing, Y.C. and P.M. Supervision--P.M.; Funding acquisition and project administration, Y.C.  
The research was funded by Natural Science and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), grant number CRDPF 530932-18. The article processing charges were waived by MDPI following a collaborative agreement.  
The authors declare no conflict of interest.