Introduction to Smart Homes

A Smart Home is comprised of collection of technical home automation concepts that are implemented and integrated together to meet certain goals and expectations of you, the client. A good job entails providing the highest quality of integration between the chosen 'Home Automation concepts' using products that are, by themselves as stand-alone products, well supported in the market and can be enhanced by cross-linking with other Smart Home systems.

Smart homes incorporate common devices that control features of the home. Originally, smart home technology was used to control environmental systems such as lighting and heating, but recently the use of smart technology has developed so that almost any electrical component within the house can be included in the system. Moreover, smart home technology does not simply turn devices on and off, it can monitor the internal environment and the activities that are being undertaken whilst the house is occupied. The result of these modifications to the technology is that a smart home can now monitor the activities of the occupant of a home, independently operate devices in set predefined patterns or independently, as the user requires.

Smart home technology uses many of the same devices that are used in assertive technology to build an environment in which many features in the home are automated and devices can communicate with each other. The below image shows the possibilities of what Smart Homes can achieve.

What are your thoughts and concerns about Smart Homes, do they pose an inconvenience or do they enhance users daily life? Share your opinions in the comment sections below.

The Samsung Smart Home

Throughout the years, Samsung has created many revolutionary IT products and one of them that amused me was the Samsung Smart Home. This system is demonstrated on the CES 2014 thus introducing the future of technology. Below is the video which talks the function of a smart home.

From the video presented, personally I feel that smart homes is a good idea where devices can be communicating with users. This also allows the users to multitask whereby humans would not capable of when things were manual or non exist. As much as the advantages of smart home applications, I would like to talk about the disadvantages of smart home application.

As most of these smart home devices uses the internet or wireless device to communicate with the home, this can be a major flaw for Malaysians that do not have their devices with internet all the time. Most of the smartphone users do not have their own internet access and usually goes to free wifi areas to obtain internet thus the data sent/received can be monitored and modify if any intention were to be made. These also might provide a huge disadvantage when people are located at a far away location without coverage or overseas whereby users may not able to connect to their home there. Wireless communication has always been a downside when it comes to data transfer, when it comes to live feedback from your camera you need the correct packets sent and received. What happen if you lost 10 packets while streaming and that 10 frame your house got robbed and shut down everything preventing you from calling the authorities? What happen if your smart home got hacked and disallowing you from using any form thus rendering you vulnerable?

Although the idea of power saving when you leave the house is revolutionary, one of the problems people faced so far is heat issue when conducting electricity. When we turn on a device, 90% of the current used is useful while 10% of the current used is turned to heat thus making the 10% useless for any use, this makes power saving still not efficient. What they should implement is to use the 10% energy that was turned to heat a form of generator for cooking or the heater when cold weather, or perhaps convert that 10% energy making it close to 0% energy wastage.

The last disadvantage I'm going to talk here is the data link throughout the whole network. Malaysia's simplest ISP which is streamyx provides a data link of 1mbps making the response of the smart home a huge downfall. This will increase the cost of living as an average Malaysian, from improving the 1mbps which is RM99 per month to RM130 per month to change to fiber optics 5mbps which is the optimal minimal requirements for a smart home, even as a fresh graduate earning RM1500 per month, living in a smart home will not provide efficiency to the user and might cause more burden to the user.

This will be the end of my discussion on the disadvantage of smart home, please do comment and provide feedback on what you all personally think about my opinion.