Smart homes will transform our lives, but not how you think
Tags: IoT, Privacy, Smart Homes, Future Of Technology, Technology

Smart homes will transform our lives, but not how you think Saro Jan 22·4 min read

Lately, the term smart home has become a catch phrase for home automation, but in the future it will be just one of the many functionalities of a smart home.

Most people spend over half of their lifetimes inside their home. It’s the place where we find comfort and security. It’s the place where we raise families, and build memories.

In the past decade, home automation has gone from a speciality tech that was only installed in million dollar celebrity homes to a common tech that any one can setup with a few hundred pounds and a few hours of their spare time.

This is just the start of a revolutionary transformation of our homes.

Right now, consumer experience with technology is broken into a hundred pieces. Technology is available to help us in all aspects of our lives such as managing our calendar, paying bills, securing our homes, entertaining ourselves, improving our fitness, preparing food, cleaning our homes, managing our personal finances, communicating with the outside world, being creative, taking care of our children, staying healthy, managing chronic conditions, caring for our mental health, to name a few.

Yet, these solutions work independently, transferring the responsibility of assemblage to the users, most of whom lack the capability or the time.

The result is a broken consumer experience, where consumers use dozens of apps that do not work with each other, appliances and “smart” devices that are not interoperate with each other, numerous websites that are mostly independent of each other, and of course, voice assistants that dont work with each other.

The exciting future of smart homes is to bring all this disparate technology, touch points and solutions together for a seamless consumer experience.

Imagine a smart home AI assistant whose primary directive is to care for your wellbeing, that brings together all of this technology and takes over the task of assembling it for you in a way that you prefer. That is the future of smart homes.

A smart home that pays your bills, takes care of your investments and debt planning, helps with budgeting, keeps your home safe and secure, organises housekeeping and maintenance, keeps tabs on your medication adherence, organises tele-health services for you, tracks your mental health, keeps tabs on your kids digital and location safety, helps with parenting duties, prepares your food, orders groceries, looks after your car, helps organise your digital memories, and stay in touch with the outside world.

There are some formidable problems that must be solved before smart homes can do more than home automation.

Convergence outside the home: Current digital solutions are attempting to bring our personal data together outside our homes. This personal data is then shared with numerous first party and third party service providers to provide some tangible utility to consumers. There are serious limitations with this approach and is probably one of the most important barriers to overcome, to bring about a seamless user experience for consumers.

Privacy : Existing smart home solutions are based on the Internet of Things model, where the brain is in the Cloud, so all your personal data must be transferred outside your home. While data privacy on social networks and communication platforms are worrying, opening up your home is a different beast altogether, where expectations of privacy is paramount.

Security : Since all smart devices are now connected to the Internet, this increases the number of entry points to compromise the home security. Combine this with the fact that users are responsible for managing the system security, its easy to see why the number of security incidents (such as the ones with ring cameras) have exponentially increased.

Knowledge expectations from users : Imagine a situation where to open a water tap in your home, you need to understand the concepts of absolute pressure, aerators, air lock, alkanity, baffle, Bernoulli’s law, facultative bacteria, Gland, and influents. Hardly anyone would use water taps in their homes. A smart home user needs to understand Zigbee, Zwave, wake words, WiFi expertise, interoperability techniques to setup and troubleshoot a smart home system.

Upfront cost : Hardware is expensive. Users are expected to pay upwards of £300 to setup a basic smart home. If they need a thermostat and security cameras, their bill shoots up to over £800. On top of this, users also need to fork out a subscription fee for cloud services. If any of the devices go bust after the warranty period, it burns a further deep hole in their wallets.

Risky venture : Over 55% of smart device manufacturers that offered a cloud service has shut them down after a few years, turning these ‘smart’ devices into paper weights(Revolv, Works with Nest, Osram, Android Things, Lowe’s, ) . Running a cloud service without recurring revenue is almost impossible and in the current turbulent period where platform providers are fighting tooth and nail to establish a moat, its still a risky time for consumers to invest heavily in a platform.

It is inevitable, and only a matter of time that an AI assistant in your home will be taking over all aspects of your lives. Lets hope and pray that this AI assistant’s loyalty and allegiance is to you rather than a large corporation.