Home automation

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Room control unit
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CITIB-AMX control panel
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Ring video doorbell with Wi-Fi camera
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August Home smart lock

Home automation or domotics [1] is building automation for a home. A home automation system will monitor and/or control home attributes such as lighting, climate, entertainment systems, and appliances. It may also include home security such as access control and alarm systems.

Contents

The phrase smart home refers to home automation devices that have internet access. Home automation, a broader category, includes any device that can be monitored or controlled via wireless radio signals, not just those having internet access. When connected with the Internet, home sensors and activation devices are an important constituent of the Internet of Things ("IoT").

A home automation system typically connects controlled devices to a central smart home hub (sometimes called a "gateway"). The user interface for control of the system uses either wall-mounted terminals, tablet or desktop computers, a mobile phone application, or a Web interface that may also be accessible off-site through the Internet.

History

Early home automation began with labor-saving machines. Self-contained electric or gas powered home appliances became viable in the 1900s with the introduction of electric power distribution [2] and led to the introduction of washing machines (1904), water heaters (1889), refrigerators (1913), sewing machines, dishwashers, and clothes dryers.

In 1975, the first general purpose home automation network technology, X10, was developed. It is a communication protocol for electronic devices. It primarily uses electric power transmission wiring for signalling and control, where the signals involve brief radio frequency bursts of digital data, and remains the most widely available. [3]

By 2012, in the United States, according to ABI Research, 1.5 million home automation systems were installed. [4] Per research firm Statista [5] more than 45 million smart home devices will be installed in U.S. homes by the end of the year 2018. [6]

The word "domotics" is a contraction of the Latin word for a home ( domus ) and the word robotics . [1] The word "smart" in "smart home" refers to the system being aware of the state of its devices, which is done through the information and communication technologies (ICT) protocol and the Internet of Things (IoT). [7]

Applications and technologies

Home automation is prevalent in a variety of different realms, including:

Implementations

Internet enabled cat feeder Cat feeder.jpg
Internet enabled cat feeder

In 2011, Microsoft Research found that home automation could involve a high cost of ownership, inflexibility of interconnected devices, and poor manageability. [19] When designing and creating a home automation system, engineers take into account several factors including scalability, how well the devices can be monitored and controlled, ease of installation and use for the consumer, affordability, speed, security, and ability to diagnose issues. [20] Findings from iControl showed that consumers prioritize ease-of-use over technical innovation, and although consumers recognize that new connected devices have an unparalleled cool factor, they are not quite ready to use them in their own homes yet. [21]

Historically, systems have been sold as complete systems where the consumer relies on one vendor for the entire system including the hardware, the communications protocol, the central hub, and the user interface. However, there are now open hardware and open source software systems which can be used instead of or with proprietary hardware. [19] Many of these systems interface with consumer electronics such as the Arduino or Raspberry Pi, which are easily accessible online and in most electronics stores. [22] In addition, home automation devices are increasingly interfaced with mobile phones through Bluetooth, allowing for increased affordability and customizability for the user. [7]

Criticism and controversies

Home automation suffers from platform fragmentation and lack of technical standards [23] [24] [25] [26] [27] [28] a situation where the variety of home automation devices, in terms of both hardware variations and differences in the software running on them, makes the task of developing applications that work consistently between different inconsistent technology ecosystems hard. [29] Customers may hesitate to bet their IoT future on proprietary software or hardware devices that use proprietary protocols that may fade or become difficult to customize and interconnect. [30]

The nature of home automation devices can also be a problem for security, data security and data privacy, since patches to bugs found in the core operating system often do not reach users of older and lower-price devices. [31] [32] One set of researchers say that the failure of vendors to support older devices with patches and updates leaves more than 87% of active devices vulnerable. [33] [34]

Concerns have been raised by tenants renting from landlords who decide to upgrade units with smart home technology. [35] These concerns include weak wireless connections that render the door or appliance unusable or impractical; the security of door passcodes kept by the landlord; and the potential invasion of privacy that comes with connecting smart home technologies to home networks.

Researchers have also conducted user studies to determine what the barriers are for consumers when integrating home automation devices or systems into their daily lifestyle. One of the main takeaways was regarding ease of use, as consumers tend to steer towards "plug and play" solutions over more complicated setups. [36] One study found that there were large gaps in the mental-models generated by users regarding how the devices actually work. [36] Specifically, the findings showed that there was a lot of misunderstanding related to where the data collected by smart devices was stored and how it was used. [36] For example, in a smart light setup, one participant thought that her iPad communicated directly with the light, telling it to either turn-off or on. [36] In reality, the iPad sends a signal to the cloud system that the company uses (in this case, the Hue Bridge) which then signals directly to the device. [36]

Overall, this field is still evolving and the nature of each device is constantly changing. While technologists work to create more secure, streamlined, and standardized security protocols, consumers also need to learn more about how these devices work and what the implications of putting them in their homes can be. The growth of this field is currently limited not only by technology but also by a user's ability to trust a device and integrate it successfully into his/her daily life.

Impact

Utilizing home automation could lead to more efficient and intelligent energy-saving techniques. [37] By integrating information and communication technologies (ICT) with renewable energy systems such as solar power or wind power, homes can autonomously make decisions about whether to store energy or expend it for a given appliance, [37] leading to overall positive environmental impacts and lower electricity bills for the consumers using the system. To do this, researchers propose using data from sensors regarding consumer activity within the home to anticipate consumer needs and balance that with energy consumption. [38]

Furthermore, home automation has a large potential regarding family safety and security. According to a 2015 survey done by iControl, the primary drivers of the demand for smart and connected devices are first "personal and family security", and second "excitement about energy savings". [39] Home automation includes a variety of smart security systems and surveillance setups. This allows consumers to monitor their homes while away, and to give trusted family members access to that information in case anything bad happens.

While there are many competing vendors, there are increasing efforts towards open source systems. However, there are issues with the current state of home automation including a lack of standardized security measures and deprecation of older devices without backwards compatibility.

Home automation has high potential for sharing data between family members or trusted individuals for personal security purposes and could lead to energy saving measures with a positive environmental impact in the future.

The home automation market was worth US$64 billion in 2022 and is projected to grow to over $163 billion in 2028.[ citation needed ]

See also

Related Research Articles

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) refer to networks of spatially dispersed and dedicated sensors that monitor and record the physical conditions of the environment and forward the collected data to a central location. WSNs can measure environmental conditions such as temperature, sound, pollution levels, humidity and wind.

Building automation (BAS), also known as building management system (BMS) or building energy management system (BEMS), is the automatic centralized control of a building's HVAC, electrical, lighting, shading, access control, security systems, and other interrelated systems. Some objectives of building automation are improved occupant comfort, efficient operation of building systems, reduction in energy consumption, reduced operating and maintaining costs and increased security.

Mutual authentication or two-way authentication refers to two parties authenticating each other at the same time in an authentication protocol. It is a default mode of authentication in some protocols and optional in others (TLS).

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edge computing</span> Distributed computing paradigm

Edge computing is a distributed computing model that brings computation and data storage closer to the sources of data, so that a user of a cloud application is likely to be physically closer to a server than if all servers were in one place. This is meant to make applications faster. More broadly, it refers to any design that pushes computation physically closer to a user, so as to reduce the latency compared to when an application runs on a single data centre. In the extreme case, this may simply refer to client-side computing.

The Internet of things (IoT) describes devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communications networks. The Internet of things encompasses electronics, communication, and computer science engineering. "Internet of things" has been considered a misnomer because devices do not need to be connected to the public internet; they only need to be connected to a network and be individually addressable.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Smart grid</span> Type of electrical grid

The smart grid is an enhancement of the 20th century electrical grid, using two-way communications and distributed so-called intelligent devices. Two-way flows of electricity and information could improve the delivery network. Research is mainly focused on three systems of a smart grid – the infrastructure system, the management system, and the protection system. Electronic power conditioning and control of the production and distribution of electricity are important aspects of the smart grid.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Time switch</span>

A time switch is a device that operates an electric switch controlled by a timer.

Cyber–Physical System (CPS) are integrations of computation with physical processes. In cyber–physical systems, physical and software components are deeply intertwined, able to operate on different spatial and temporal scales, exhibit multiple and distinct behavioral modalities, and interact with each other in ways that change with context. CPS involves transdisciplinary approaches, merging theory of cybernetics, mechatronics, design and process science. The process control is often referred to as embedded systems. In embedded systems, the emphasis tends to be more on the computational elements, and less on an intense link between the computational and physical elements. CPS is also similar to the Internet of Things (IoT), sharing the same basic architecture; nevertheless, CPS presents a higher combination and coordination between physical and computational elements.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Cloud computing</span> Form of shared Internet-based computing

Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over multiple locations, each of which is a data center. Cloud computing relies on sharing of resources to achieve coherence and typically uses a pay-as-you-go model, which can help in reducing capital expenses but may also lead to unexpected operating expenses for users.

Software-defined networking (SDN) is an approach to network management that enables dynamic and programmatically efficient network configuration to improve network performance and monitoring in a manner more akin to cloud computing than to traditional network management. SDN is meant to improve the static architecture of traditional networks and may be employed to centralize network intelligence in one network component by disassociating the forwarding process of network packets from the routing process. The control plane consists of one or more controllers, which are considered the brains of the SDN network, where the whole intelligence is incorporated. However, centralization has certain drawbacks related to security, scalability and elasticity.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Index of home automation articles</span>

This is a list of home automation topics on Wikipedia. Home automation is the residential extension of building automation. It is automation of the home, housework or household activity. Home automation may include centralized control of lighting, HVAC, appliances, security locks of gates and doors and other systems, to provide improved convenience, comfort, energy efficiency and security.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Saraju Mohanty</span> Indian-American computer scientist

Saraju Mohanty is an Indian-American professor of the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and the director of the Smart Electronic Systems Laboratory, at the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas. Mohanty received a Glorious India Award – Rich and Famous NRIs of America in 2017 for his contributions to the discipline. Mohanty is a researcher in the areas of "smart electronics for smart cities/villages", "smart healthcare", "application-Specific things for efficient edge computing", and "methodologies for digital and mixed-signal hardware". He has made significant research contributions to security by design (SbD) for electronic systems, hardware-assisted security (HAS) and protection, high-level synthesis of digital signal processing (DSP) hardware, and mixed-signal integrated circuit computer-aided design and electronic design automation. Mohanty has been the editor-in-chief (EiC) of the IEEE Consumer Electronics Magazine during 2016-2021. He has held the Chair of the IEEE Computer Society's Technical Committee on Very Large Scale Integration during 2014-2018. He holds 4 US patents in the areas of his research, and has published 500 research articles and 5 books. He is ranked among top 2% faculty around the world in Computer Science and Engineering discipline as per the standardized citation metric adopted by the Public Library of Science Biology journal.

Fog computing or fog networking, also known as fogging, is an architecture that uses edge devices to carry out a substantial amount of computation, storage, and communication locally and routed over the Internet backbone.

Transactive energy refers to the economic and control techniques used to manage the flow or exchange of energy within an existing electric power system in regards to economic and market based standard values of energy. It is a concept that is used in an effort to improve the efficiency and reliability of the power system, pointing towards a more intelligent and interactive future for the energy industry.

Time Slotted Channel Hopping or Time Synchronized Channel Hopping (TSCH) is a channel access method for shared-medium networks.

Crowdsensing, sometimes referred to as mobile crowdsensing, is a technique where a large group of individuals having mobile devices capable of sensing and computing collectively share data and extract information to measure, map, analyze, estimate or infer (predict) any processes of common interest. In short, this means crowdsourcing of sensor data from mobile devices.

The industrial internet of things (IIoT) refers to interconnected sensors, instruments, and other devices networked together with computers' industrial applications, including manufacturing and energy management. This connectivity allows for data collection, exchange, and analysis, potentially facilitating improvements in productivity and efficiency as well as other economic benefits. The IIoT is an evolution of a distributed control system (DCS) that allows for a higher degree of automation by using cloud computing to refine and optimize the process controls.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Home Assistant</span> Home automation software

Home Assistant is free and open-source software for home automation, designed to be an Internet of things (IoT) ecosystem-independent integration platform and central control system for smart home devices, with a focus on local control and privacy. It can be accessed through a web-based user interface, by using companion apps for Android and iOS, or by voice commands via a supported virtual assistant, such as Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa, and their own "Assist".

Internet of vehicles (IoV) is a network of vehicles equipped with sensors, software, and the technologies that mediate between these with the aim of connecting & exchanging data over the Internet according to agreed standards. IoV evolved from Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks, and is expected to ultimately evolve into an "Internet of autonomous vehicles". It is expected that IoV will be one of the enablers for an autonomous, connected, electric, and shared (ACES) Future Mobility.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">IoT Forensics</span> Branch of digital forensics

IoT Forensics is a branch of Digital forensics that has the goal of identifying and extracting digital information from devices belonging to the Internet of things field, using a forensically sound and legally acceptable process.

References

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  2. ↑ Home Automation & Wiring (1 ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics. 1999-03-31. ISBN   978-0-07-024674-4.
  3. ↑ Rye, Dave (October 1999). "My Life at X10". AV and Automation Industry eMagazine. Archived from the original on September 30, 2014. Retrieved October 8, 2014.
  4. ↑ "1.5 Million Home Automation Systems Installed in the US This Year". ABI Research. November 19, 2012. Retrieved 2016-11-22.
  5. ↑ "Smart Home - United States | Statista Market Forecast". Statista. Retrieved 2019-11-07.
  6. ↑ Caccavale, Michael (September 24, 2018). "The Impact Of The Digital Revolution On The Smart Home Industry". Forbes. Retrieved 2019-11-07.
  7. 1 2 Mandula, K.; Parupalli, R.; Murty, C. A. S.; Magesh, E.; Lunagariya, R. (December 2015). "Mobile based home automation using Internet of Things(IoT)". 2015 International Conference on Control, Instrumentation, Communication and Computational Technologies (ICCICCT). pp. 340–343. doi:10.1109/ICCICCT.2015.7475301. ISBN   978-1-4673-9825-1. S2CID   14737576.
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  19. 1 2 Brush, A. J.; Lee, Bongshin; Mahajan, Ratul; Agarwal, Sharad; Saroiu, Stefan; Dixon, Colin (2011-05-01). "Home Automation in the Wild: Challenges and Opportunities". Microsoft Research.
  20. ↑ Sriskanthan, N.; Tan, F.; Karande, A. (August 2002). "Bluetooth based home automation system". Microprocessors and Microsystems. 26 (6): 281–289. doi:10.1016/S0141-9331(02)00039-X.
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  29. ↑ Brown, Eric (September 13, 2016). "Who Needs the Internet of Things?". Linux.com. Retrieved 2016-11-22.
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  35. ↑ Ng, Alfred (March 7, 2019). "Your landlord turns your apartment into a smart home. Now what?". CNET. Retrieved 2020-10-02.
  36. 1 2 3 4 5 Kaaz, Kim J.; Hoffer, Alex; Saeidi, Mahsa; Sarma, Anita; Bobba, Rakesh B. (October 2017). "Understanding user perceptions of privacy, and configuration challenges in home automation". 2017 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). Raleigh, NC: IEEE. pp. 297–301. doi:10.1109/VLHCC.2017.8103482. ISBN   978-1-5386-0443-4. S2CID   36313196.
  37. 1 2 Risteska Stojkoska, Biljana L.; Trivodaliev, Kire V. (January 2017). "A review of Internet of Things for smart home: Challenges and solutions". Journal of Cleaner Production. 140: 1454–1464. doi:10.1016/j.jclepro.2016.10.006. S2CID   53696817.
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  39. ↑ Kaaz, Kim J.; Hoffer, Alex; Saeidi, Mahsa; Sarma, Anita; Bobba, Rakesh B. (October 2017). "Understanding user perceptions of privacy, and configuration challenges in home automation". 2017 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC). Raleigh, NC: IEEE. pp. 297–301. doi:10.1109/VLHCC.2017.8103482. ISBN   978-1-5386-0443-4. S2CID   36313196.
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