A smart home is a residence that uses internet-connected devices for remote monitoring and management of various appliances and systems (e.g. heating, lighting).
Smart home technology is often called home automation or domotics. The main areas for home automation are security, comfort and energy efficiency. Owner can control it usually using his smartphone or other networked device. The first general purpose home automation network protocol was X10, which uses power lines for control signal transmission. These signals convey commands to corresponding devices, controlling how and when they should operate (e.g. turn on at a specific time). Today’s home automation network protocols ale mostly covered by the Internet of things (IoT) protocols as Zigbee, Z-Wave, LoRaWan, SigFox, NB-IoT, etc. as well as WiFi and Bluetooth. Many companies including Amazon, Apple and Google have released their own smart home products and home automation platforms as Amazon Echo, Apple HomeKit and Google Home. Newly built homes are often constructed with smart home infrastructure in place. Older homes, on the other hand, can be retrofitted with smart technologies.
Smart home technologies have widely entered the domestic space touching nearly every aspect of life. Some representative technologies among them are:
Smart home can offer many benefits, among them are following:
However, smart home systems have struggled to become mainstream, in part due to their drawbacks, which are e.g. as follows:
A smart home is not set of disparate smart devices and appliances, but ones that work together to create a remotely controllable network. All devices are controlled by a master home automation controller, often called a smart home hub.
The smart home hub is a hardware device that acts as the central point of the smart home system and is able to sense, process data and communicate wirelessly. It combines all of the disparate apps into a single smart home app that can be controlled remotely by homeowners. The most known hubs usually have voice-activated systems, contain virtual assistants that learn and personalize the smart home to the residents' preferences and patterns. They contain machine learning algorithms allowing home automation applications to adapt to their environments. Examples of smart home hubs include:
For reasonable automation the central unit (hub) needs the set of sensors to control the actuators. The scenarios can be complex and condition, where the particular action is performed can be combined from multiple sensors and conditions. The sensors include:
As the actuators there are also many options, among others:
Some smart home systems can be created from scratch, for example, using a Raspberry Pi or other prototyping board. Others can be purchased as a bundled smart home kit - also known as a smart home platform - that contains the pieces needed to start a home automation project. There are also many open source software systems for smart home automation as [1], [2], [3]:
It seems that the most used solutions are AH and OH [6]. When comparing them, the OH seems to be a great choice for the experienced users (especially coders) as the complicated built-in tools give you superpowers to customize and tinker with the routines. All other users, however, should go for HA as a more consumer friendly product creating a comprehensive smart home eco-system.
While every smart home is a smart building, not every smart building is a smart home. Enterprise, commercial, industrial and residential buildings of all shapes and sizes - including offices, skyscrapers, apartment buildings, and multi-tenant offices and residences - are deploying IoT technologies to improve building efficiency, reduce energy costs and environmental impact, and ensure security, as well as improve occupant satisfaction. Many of the same smart technologies used in the smart home are deployed in smart buildings, including lighting, energy, heating and air conditioning, and security and building access systems.
For example, a smart building can reduce energy costs using sensors that detect how many occupants are in a room. The temperature can automatically adjust, putting cool air on if sensors detect a full conference room, or turning the heat down if everyone in the office has gone home for the day. Smart buildings can also connect to the smart grid. Here, smart building components and the electric grid can "talk" and "listen" to each other. With this technology, energy distribution can be managed efficiently, maintenance can be handled proactively and power outages can be responded to more quickly.
Beyond these benefits, smart building can provide building owners and managers the benefit of predictive maintenance.
Janitors, for example, can refill restroom supplies when sensors monitoring the soap or paper towel dispensers indicate low. Or maintenance and failures can be predicted on building refrigeration, elevators and lighting systems.