In recent years, home automation has become popular and more accessible to more homeowners. If this were a different decade, you’ve probably thought of home automation as something that could only be found in commercial establishments and expensive homes.

With the rapid development of technology and the growing accessibility of Internet connection, home automation is available to almost anyone. Such technologies have become increasingly accessible that even hobbyists could make their own smart home devices from scratch with minimal programming.

Today, we’ll be talking about the possibilities and prospects of home automation in the coming years. With smart home devices like Google’s Alexa becoming an integrated part of the household, what else could this trend bring to our homes?

1. Home Automation and the Internet of Things

Home automation works on the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). To put IoT simply, this is a system of devices that are interconnected to the same network. Through this network, devices can send and receive data to perform certain functions. Let’s make it simpler by visualizing an example.

The basic concept of IoT technology involves one device that will send a command (similar to that of the remote control), one device to receive that data, also known as the smart device, and your router. Now let’s replace these with familiar objects. Your remote control could be your smartphone or tablet, while your smart device could be a smart wireless plug. Because they are both connected to the Internet, you can send an “on” or “off” command to your smart plug so that you can turn it off even if you’re not physically present in your home.

The concept works the same way when several smart devices are connected to the network. Because each device has a unique IP address, you can send separate commands to different devices, even if you’re using the same smartphone or tablet as your remote control.

There are already a lot of smart home devices available on the market today, from security cameras, smart locks, light controllers, and many more. But if you want to try building one from scratch, you could try looking at micro-controllers like Arduino and Raspberry Pi and their compatible devices. While it would take some coding, there are numerous tutorials available online.

2. Home Automation Trends in 2024

The trend of home automation has been reaching more homes in the past few years, and it looks like smart home technologies are going to be an integrated part of a typical house very soon. Here are some of the trends that we’re seeing for home automation in the coming years.

3. Efforts in Standardization

Because of the increasing accessibility of smart home devices, you see various suppliers offering them left and right. While increased availability is good, we don’t really know if all these devices will work on various platforms. The lack of standardization also causes some users to stick to an Internet service provider even if they can’t get their value for money out of their services. This happens if the user can’t get a tool to work nicely on their preferred platform.

Aside from that, since a lot of these commercial smart home devices are not open-source, users might also feel overwhelmed with the various apps they have to download to make these devices work.

These are a few of the reasons why manufacturers have to make sure that their devices work on different platforms and standards. The good news is, manufacturers like Apple, Google, and Amazon are planning to work together to establish standards in smart home devices.

4. Smarter Devices in the Next Decade

We often think that remotely controlling your home locks via your tablet or smartphone is as smart as a home automation system gets. But in recent years, devices are getting smarter with the use of technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.

With these technologies serving as part of the brain of these devices, smart devices become actually smart by taking note of human behavior. We’ve seen these in some devices like Nest and Honeywell’s smart thermostat or those smart refrigerators that let you see what’s inside. Sources note that we’ll see more smart home devices with these technology integrated into their systems in the next decade.

5. Domestic Robots

While we won’t see something similar to Rosie, the Robot Maid from The Jetsons in the near future, domestic robots are also becoming quite common to more households.

It started with robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers, and now, artificial intelligence is being explored for other domestic tasks as well. Soon, robots can now be used for tasks like cooking, cleaning, providing companionship, and healthcare. Experts predict that this technology will become more accessible and affordable in the coming years because several manufacturers are already working on these products.

6. Healthcare at Home

Another trend we’ll see in the next years will be the ubiquity of smart devices that monitors healthcare at home. On the preventive side, we’re already familiar with smartwatches that track our physical activities, nutrition levels, and sleep. Meanwhile, other devices connect users to their healthcare providers remotely and even diagnose illnesses using artificial intelligence.

The great thing about having smart devices for healthcare is that it lessens the need for outpatient visits to the hospital, and hospital resources could be focused on urgent cases. What’s more, vital stats and data could be collected from a patient’s natural environment as compared to a stressful environment like a hospital.

7. Faster Networks, Smarter Homes

With the upcoming rollout of 5G and an improved system in the WiFi 6, smart home devices would be able to process bigger data at a faster rate.

While 5G is currently available in select locations in the United States only, it is set to revolutionize how smart devices work. With this technology, devices would now be connected to the Internet without having to use wired connections with minimal power consumption. What’s more, a 5G connection also lets you connect more devices to the network. This latest development is especially useful for areas that are heavily saturated with devices competing for bandwidth. Meanwhile, WiFi 6 will let us handle devices that are competing for network access simultaneously.

On the one hand, these technologies will let devices transfer data between devices or between a device and the cloud at a faster rate. But on the other hand, it also means that the smart home devices could now handle bigger chunks of data at more rapid streams. In short, these devices could utilize more sophisticated software to become more adapted and reliable in our daily lives.

The Verdict

With the growing accessibility of an Internet connection and the affordability of devices in the future, home automation will become the norm in the coming years. On the surface level, it merely seems that machines are taking over our tasks as humans. But on the bright side, letting machines take over some of these domestic tasks frees up our time and let us focus on more important things.

From standardization in manufacturing to the smarter machine processing to the coming of 5G and WiFi 6, there are a lot of prospects and possibilities for home automation in the coming years. We might not be in the age of flying cars yet, but the trend of home automation is indeed amazing.

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The concept of ‘connectivity’ is going beyond laptops and smartphones as we see it moving towards smart cities, smart homes, smart retail, smart farming, connected cars, connected wearable devices and connected healthcare. In short a connected life. The Internet of Things is a popular terminology these days, but unlike many technological fads, which have come and gone in the last years, the Internet of Things proves to be an important trend, which is having long lasting effects on the society. The term “Internet of Things” itself is used to mean a variety of ideas. The IoT cloud platform is primarily designed to store and process IoT data and forms the core of all IoT devices and IoT solution. The platform is built in a way that it enables taking in a huge amount of data generated by sensors, websites, applications and initiate actions for real-time responses and analytics.

For example, Smart Refrigerators can automatically order the run out items, similarly when you use Smart Locks, you do not need to have multiple keys for them, and you can unlock them by using smart phones.  The platform can provide businesses with an extensive and integrated perspective of customers, without needing much technical expertise of a data analyst. The platform can intake lot of events each day and users can define rules that state events to act on and what actions to take. The demand for cloud enabled IoT services and solutions is rapidly increasing.

A report by Zinnov Zones says India has about 43 per cent or $1.5 billion of the global $3.5 billion IoT market. Experts predicts that Indian IoT market will grow from $1.5 billion today to more than $9 billion by 2020 with over 2.7 billion connected devices and growing.

Another Gartner report predicts, by ‘2020 the number of connected devices across all technologies will reach to about 20.6 billion’.

The real world IoT-Cloud platform application

1. Smart Home Automation

How would you feel if you could switch off lights after you left home/office or switch the AC on before reaching home? With IoT, taking shape there is introduction of a world where all the smart devices can be in constant connection with each other and are monitored by users remotely via voice commands or by a simple click. With the rapid growth of IoT, it is predicted Smart Homes will be as common as smart phones. It has also been predicted by Gil Press that more than two thirds of consumers plan to buy connected technology for their homes by 2019.

2. Smart Wearable Technology

A detailed report by TechRepublic says in 2016, wearable were sold at a rate of 38 million and a large portion of them was fitness trackers and smart watches. These two classifications will make up a joint income of $4.9 billion. Wearable devices are installed with sensors and software is which collect data and information about the users. This data is later pre-processed to extract essential insights about the user. The pre-requisite from IoT technology for wearable applications is to be highly energy efficient, low power and small sized. The productivity of data processing achieved by various smart wrist wear, hearing devices, and smart glasses is getting closer to where wearable will bring exceptional value to our lives.

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3. Connected Vehicles

Gartner predicts that about 250,000,000 connected cars will be out on the roads by 2020. So, what really are connected cars? IoT engineers have come up with an industry solution for connected automobiles that gathers, analyzes, stores and takes action on vehicle sensor data. A connected vehicle is one, which is able to improve and analyze its own operation, maintenance as well as comfort of passengers using on-board sensors and internet connectivity. IoT for automobiles is a vehicle-to-cloud offering that enables awareness of the environment even beyond the vehicles and helps use information to establish a relationship with the driver as well.

4. Industrial Internet

The IIoT (Industrial IoT) enables industrial engineering with sensors, software and big data analytics to build intelligent equipment. Smart machines are precise and consistent than humans in communicating data. In addition, this analytics on the generated data can help companies pick inabilities and problems fast. In the meanwhile, did you know that about 5.4 million IoT devices would be used on oil extraction sites by 2020 to provide environmental metrics about extraction sites?

5. Smart Cities

IoT has the potential of solving major problems faced by the people living in cities like pollution, traffic congestion and shortage of energy supplies etc. IoT will empower cities to leverage their network to offer advanced smart city applications for citizens, new eco-sustainability initiatives and create first-hand opportunities for enterprise development.

6. IoT in Agriculture

To help increase farm performance, IoT technology providers continue to develop IoT cloud based platforms that can sense, process and communicate precisely measured environmental data. Farms are becoming more connected as farmers realize the potential of IoT in helping them reduce cost while achieving improved results.

7. Smart Retail

IoT Smart Retail enables stores to revolutionize customer service while saving time and money, while simultaneously providing the consumer with a seamless shopping experience. By installing this system, retailers are also able to recapture investment dollars while surpassing expectations for tech-savvy consumers. Some of the components included in Smart Retail are Power shelf, Beacons and Digital Price Tags.

8. IoT for Healthcare

Research says IoT in healthcare will be enormous in coming years. It is aimed at enabling people to live healthier life by wearing connected devices. For example, through IoT, doctors can use GPS services and be prepared for treating patients being brought to the hospital in emergency cases.

9. IoT in Telecom Industry

Global telecom operators now use IoT enabled digital platforms that are a combination of connectivity, analysis, security, mobile and cloud to support businesses. This is helping them reduce operating costs while enabling end-users to consume technology in a business-focused manner saving time and money.

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