What Does The Smart Home Industry Promises Us in The Future

The smart home technology is steadily moving from labs and showrooms to department stores. Smart fridges that will order the food for you and overs controlled through an app are no longer bold futurist predictions, but actual products that are soon to hit the mass market.

The predicted growth for smart home global market is estimated at 14.07% between 2016 and 2022 and is expected to hit $150 billion in worth by 2020 as more and more folks are getting keen to put their hands on the latest gizmos and gadgets. North Americas and Asia-Pacific region are now among the most lucrative markets for smart homes.

What's Driving The Smart Home Industry?

Several major companies including Google, Samsung, Amazon, Bosch and others are putting millions of dollars into developing new technologies that will seamlessly integrate the digital and physical worlds in our home and cars. The market is mainly driven by the increasing need for convenience, new energy saving and low carbon emission solutions and smarter safety and security.

The US smart home market is currently reported to be in the "chasm" of the tech adoption curve a.k.a. the crucial stage between the early-adopter and the mass-market phase as manufacturers still need to prove the need and convenience of their products.

What's Holding The Smart Home Industry Back?

While a lot of consumers already expressed their readiness to invest into home automation systems and test-drive new gizmos, the consumer demand is still far from going mainstream. High prices and long device replacement cycles are among the top reasons for preventing further growth.

Another major barrier is the technological fragmentation within the connected home ecosystem itself. Currently, different manufactures opt to use different standards and networks for their products, which make it confusing (and often impossible) for customers to set up, control and efficiently use multiple devices created by different companies. Manufactures should cooperate and create unified industry standards, which all technology providers could follow before smart home appliances will be able to hit mass-market.

Creating closed ecosystems, where different smart home devices could be controlled through a single point, is another important step manufactures should undertake. As Kevin Foreman noted: "To date, the smart home lacks a killer app to drive these experiences but once this is made available, consumer adoption will skyrocket. Providing real-time feedback is the best way to get consumers interested in adopting smart home technologies".

Wearables can come as a great solution to this issue. Integrating wearable devices like Google Glass with smart home systems will introduce the ability to chain multiple verbal or touch-based technologies that use occupancy rather than motion. All of us has had an issue with motion powered lights in the bathroom for instance, which turned off before we were done there and forced us to wave vigorously in the darkness to turn those sensors back. Micro-location beacons run on BLE could solve this problem.

Nymi is among the first wearable devices, which started using this approach. This smart bracelet is worn on the wrist and can authenticate your identity through the distinct heart rate variability. This device can gather information about the person's body temperature and adjust the thermostat accordingly, for example. Additionally, it could provide better data on location information through the home and offer unique, seamless authentication for advanced security. Speaking of which...

Security Hazards The Smart Home Industry Should Deal With

With the massive rise of cybercrime and identity thefts in the past few years, consumers become more and more concerned about keeping their personal data safe and locked. Smart homes, however, become a massive source of personal data hackers will be keen on getting their hands on. Currently, 9 out of 10 Brits admit that they are afraid that cyber criminals will easily hack their smart homes and use their data against them.

Installing a traditional security system in this case will not keep you safe. Hence, comes the need for new security technologies developed specifically for smart home gadgets and systems. All connected devices should come with strong privacy protection and remote updating capabilities, which is the direct responsibility of the manufacture. Yet, consumers should educate themselves of the possible security threats that gadget may posse and be diligent when it comes to following safety instructions issued by the provider.

According to a recent survey conducted by Intel, consumers don't feel rather enthusiastic about the existing security methods for smart homes and IoT devices. Four out of ten foreseeing passwords as a major source of frustration with smart homes, 75% feel somewhat concerned about number passwords that would be required to manage their homes. Biometrics so far has scored the highest results as an alternative mean of authentication and security – 54% opted for fingerprints, 46% vouched for voice recognition and 42% for eye scans.

Conclusions

The smart home definitely opens up a new world of opportunity and seeing all the sci-fi and high street innovations going mass market is certainly exciting. Yet, the industry still has a lot of issues to tackle first including connectivity, smarter authentication and bulletproof security standards. Establishing unified standards for different devices that constitute the essential backbone, which will allow disparate products to interact seamlessly with one another, will shape the future of smart home adoption.