Where do I start to describe a Smart Home? It basically consists of a Virtualized Environment that allows you to control, automate and monitor different objects in your home. These objects are called Things and there is a huge variety of them: from lights to locks, from heating systems to electricity metering devices. In summary, these components allow you to manage your life at home.
The essence of the Smart Home is the ability to control all these devices at one place, with a unique interface, rather than having to use different applications for every device. This way it’s much easier to manage everything.
What are Smart Home Software?
Smart Home Software is an area in the IoT that provides Virtualized Environments and tools for Smart Homes and their Things. These components allow the user to manage, control and monitor objects in a single place: smart home software platforms .
There are four main things that a user of a Smart Home Software platform should expect from the software:
Automation/Rules Engine
The ability to automate actions based on time, location, presence or some other logic. For example, it can automatically turn off all lights when there’s no movement in the observatory for at least three minutes.
Interface/User Experience
The interface should be friendly and simple to use. It is meant to enhance the user experience, not to confuse or irritate him/her.
Data Analytics
Data analytics is a huge part of smart homes: especially when it comes to home automation (for example, turning off the porch light after the person has entered the house). It is used in order to determine the actions that are being performed, when they’re being performed and if everything is working correctly.
Multi-Device Support
A smart home software platform should be able to connect with all kinds of Things in your home, regardless of its manufacturer or protocol it uses.
It’s important to note that there are two main types of Smart Homes:
1) Traditional Home Automation
Where the automation and remote management of every “Thing” in your home is done by dedicated software. This type of automation was apparent with the first mobile phones, which allowed you to control appliances at home remotely (even though most applications had limited functions).
2) Integrated Smart Home
Where the virtualization is applied to an existing IoT infrastructure for it to become a Smart Environment. In this case, the existing Things are managed by different applications. For example, smart lights are managed by a dedicated application developed by their manufacturer, while electricity meters are still being managed through their own dedicated app.
3) The best of both worlds
In this case, there is a Virtualized Environment to control all the Things and each Thing is managed by its dedicated application.
What are Smart Home Software?
The future of smart homes is very promising. There are many components involved in this technology, which all need to communicate with each other. The complexity of the environment increases exponentially as more and more devices are added to it, because multiple protocols have to be supported by every product for compatibility with existing solutions.
The multitude of IoT Things already available doesn’t help either. These devices can be controlled through dedicated apps or through a Virtualized Environment that’s compatible with as many Things as possible. In the latter case, the developer of such an environment has to implement support for each IoT protocol out there.
In other words, manufacturers have been duplicating their efforts until now by developing their own platforms and protocols. As a result, the IoT market is filled with multiple incompatible standards.
