infoTECH Feature

April 28, 2009

Home Service 3 - Home Control

The word home automation brings to mind integrated services and unified control of lighting, security, sprinklers, temperature and so on. It also brings to mind multi-million dollar mansions, a team of architects and electricians and a system that can cost more than your average home. The good news is that times are changing fast. The price for these systems is dropping significantly and, in fact, is headed to become a fraction of current costs.
 

One reason for the predicted dramatic price drop is that highly fault tolerant, low power and low cost wireless mesh technologies now exist which can add control and communications capabilities to virtually any electric powered device in a very cost effective manner. The significance of communications enabling electric devices via wireless is that the major roadblock in the adoption of home automation by the mass market is costs associated with home rewiring. Two popular building automation standards for wireless mesh networks are Zigbee and Z-Wave. Since your washing machine will not need to handle media with high fidelity, these standards provide a much cheaper technology than MoCA and WiFi (News - Alert) for controlling a large class of appliances in the home.

 

Another important reason is that the basis for making these wireless mesh infrastructures pervasive on a national scale is already being laid and subsidized as part of the electricity industries smart energy grid initiative.  One important aspect of the smart energy grid is that home electric meters are becoming two-way communications enabled and thus, an extensible service platform as well. In most likelihood the enabling technology for smart meters will be Zigbee, this is the standard that everyone From GE, who is the largest manufacturer of smart meters in North America to PG&E (News - Alert) and government run utilities have agreed on. Just based on this fact we know with virtual certainty that by the year 2012 at a minimum 7,000,000 homes will have Zigbee-based smart electricity meters just in the U.S. and thus a pervasive command and control infrastructure for carrier based home control. Let’s consider a use case scenario of carrier centric and ubiquitous home control:

 

Tara is on holidays, she forgot to water her plants before leaving. She asks her friend Sara to go over and water the plants for her. Sara calls Tara when she is at her door, and Tara opens up the home services application on her phone. She goes to the home control section where with the press of a button the door opens for Sara, it happens to be nighttime, so while she is at it Tara remotely turns all the lights for Sara, all using her phone. Now through the DLNA cameras in Tara’s house, which stream directly to her phone, she can guide Sara to all the plants in her house that need watering. Before she logs off, Tara checks to see how much electricity she has used the past week just for the fun of it.

 

I hope this article has given you an idea of the exciting role home control can play as part of a home services offering.

 
 



Edited by Greg Galitzine
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