The Elusive Smart Home

Each year as the annual Consumer Electronics Show approaches, the news media is filled with marketing hype about the elusive Smart Home market. But this market is just as misdirected today as it was in 1957.

Whirlpool was wrong 58 years ago when it introduced its Miracle Kitchen, and I think it’s wrong about home automation today too. All the company did was offer a Smart Home vision that never crossed the chasm to mass-market adoption. The problem wasn’t a lack of sensors, actuators, electronics, or network standards, but marketing and the inability to understand consumer needs and wants, or the ability to show a value proposition and deliver a solution with ease of use and affordability.

I still have seen no company that truly “gets it” or knows how to deliver the smart home vision — not Whirlpool and not Apple or Microsoft or Google or Philips or BestBuy. A lot of innovation has occurred in the last 50-some years that is getting us closer to the Smart Home vision, including smartphones and the Internet of Things, but there are still many marketing barriers that these companies don’t seem to understand. The best explanation of what it will take to overcome the barriers to the smart home is in the Beacon Agency video at the end of this article. But first…

Whirlpool’s Vision Update from CES 2016

I find it interesting to contrast the 1957 Whirlpool vision above with the video shown here from CES 2016. At least Whirlpool is “trying” to innovate, but they still don’t get the fallacy of integrating so much digital technology into appliances that otherwise would last 10-20 years, causing them to go obsolete much faster than they should. If that’s by design, just know that what seems good for profits is not always good for consumers.

My Smart Home perspective & bias

Toward the end of my 30-year IBM career (in the early 1990s), I introduced the company to the Smart Home market, represented its interests in several industry standards initiatives, and later retired to start CAZITech, a connected home consulting firm. The Smart Home, and Smart Fridge, continues to elude mass market adoption.Several years ago I wrote with skepticism about the Smart Refrigerator, and the CES video above reminded me of that. The problem with smart appliances is that rapid advancements in computer, networking and storage technology enable new features at lower cost each year, making slightly older products obsolete more quickly than ever before. But do you really need the latest features when appliances work fine for a decade or more? Do you really need to replace your perfectly good refrigerator with a new $9,000 model because it features a built-in, color touch-screen and wireless Internet access? What does it do differently or better to justify that cost? And wouldn’t you rather use a touch screen at the kitchen table than standing at the fridge? In my article I describe how to make an even smarter fridge with your existing iPad and less than $40 in parts. The lessons presented apply to medical devices, cars, and other smart home products too.

LG & Samsung continue to add unnecessary electronics

Also added to this article from CES 2016 is this video of the latest tricked-out refrigerators from LG and Samsung. (Click here if the embedded version won’t play, or just Google CES 2016 – fridges)

So what will it take?

BestBuy has the “potential” to become a big player in connected home products, but there’s still more work to do. On the plus side, having a large inventory and a website to help people choose is an advantage, as is having a dedicated section of the store. But still, appliances are in a different section, and consumer electronics are somewhere else, so it’s hard for consumers to experience the whole value proposition in one place. I doubt that store sales staff will know much about home control systems, meaning consumers will be mostly left to explore on their own, so self-service point-of-sale education is key. I do like that their website has buyer ratings and could be improved with instructional videos to show what automation can do with little effort, or a lot. Those videos could even be made available in store kiosks.

A bigger problem for BestBuy or anyone else trying to fulfill the Smart Home promise will come when if-then-else automation evolves into smart agents with artificial intelligence that learn, because it will then be even harder to show the value of learned behavior that evolves with time.

Smart Homes versus Automated Homes

Consumers like the benefits of home automation but not the cost and effort to automate. No wonder this industry remains stalled, even after 60 years. It just takes too much effort to program the automation. There are too many different types of things to automate. And we rely too much on rules-based programs (e.g. “If this happens, then do that” or “Do this at this time”). Even the most skilled technicians can’t anticipate future needs. So adding new devices or making minor lifestyle changes can mean adding or changing the rules. While that ensures continued employment for technicians, it limits market expansion. Maybe the Smart Home industry should consider a service model rather than a product model (see video at end).

A truly “SMART” home would learn on its own, discover new devices, notice changes in activity, and adjust without programming. That would require a sense of what’s going on with human-like sensors that listen, see, feel, and smell. A “smart” home may also need the ability to question occupants and carry on a conversation.

“I notice that you regularly do this,” the home may ask. “Do you want me to do that for you automatically?” Or, “I heard a strange noise [like a crash or glass break]. Are you OK? Do you want me to call 911?”

Logo - Merasoft was an early innovator, producing a working Smart Home that actually learned and adapted automatically, without programming.This was exactly the vision of Merasoft, a small Utah-based company that ended up going out of business before completing its system. I was on their advisory board before retiring from IBM in 1999, and I saw their system in action. It worked well, but they had to invent technologies that were outside of their core competency. They needed help from big companies to fulfill their dream, which was based on neural networks and learning agents.

To listen, Merasoft also invented room sensors with microphone arrays and digital signal processing code to distinguish between different sounds, such as door bell or glass break, and to better understand human speech — close up, far away, or around the corner. They also modified IBM’s ViaVoice speech recognition technology to be multi-user, so people in different rooms could interact simultaneously.

To see, the company developed room nodes with CMOS image sensors that could recognize light or darkness, faces and even gestures. The house, for example, could notice that the husband seemed to sit on the sofa when he got home from work and turn on the TV to CNN. It could then ask if he wanted that task automated when he sat there at that time of day.

Merasoft also believed smart home sensors should include the ability to feel (temperature & humidity) and smell (smoke & CO2). And with the ability to sense surroundings and learn, there was no need to program new rules. The Merasoft project was 20 years ago, and I’ve seen nothing since that even comes close.

Merasoft’s competency was in neural networks and learning agents, and most of their engineering talent was from Brigham Young University. IBM liked their use of CMOS image sensors for surveillance apps, gesture recognition, and facial recognition and had already done a lot of work in those areas. IBM also liked their DSP-based microphone array, which could distinguish between different voices or various sounds and eliminate noise, echo and reverb to improve speech recognition. That way, voice commands could be clearly understood from a distance or when others in the same room having a party. Other sounds the microphone could recognize included glass break [a burglary?] and fall detection. And by knowing who else was at home, the system could act autonomously if the occupant didn’t answer voice prompts. There was no longer a need to say, “Help. I’ve fallen and can’t get up.”

Merasoft became an IBM business partner and made extensive changes to IBM’s ViaVoice software to support multiple simultaneous conversations and to improve the text-to-speech voice quality so it didn’t sound like a robot. With just 30-minutes of capturing a specific voice pattern, the system could be made to sound like anyone, including me, and I’ve still not heard anything as good since.

At first glance, the voice conversations sound like what Alexa can do today, look further. At 3:49, for example, the microphone hears the sound of a fall and asks the little girl if she’s OK or if she wants to call 911. Now remember, this video was from over 20 years ago.

The Challenge of Marketing Smart Homes

Think of the challenge of selling smart home technology, where potential customers need to “experience” the value proposition in order to understand the benefits. That can’t be done in retail stores like BestBuy. Consumers need to see it in a real home.

Merasoft had a brilliant marketing plan and choice of marketing channels, but I won’t discuss more here. Just think, however, about what it will take to move the Home Automation industry across the chasm separating early adopters and early majority customers and then toward the vision of a truly Smart Home. Who (what companies) might lead such a move? What partnerships would they need? How could they build a “camp” of partners supporting their technology? How could they make sure that their technology became standardized?

Understanding Market Requirements

Rather than develop products and then find markets for them, isn’t it better to first understand market needs? Now that doesn’t mean asking consumers what they want, because they may not even know. They almost certainly won’t know what’s technically possible or feasible. Instead, marketers should study what they do, enjoy doing, would like to do, hate doing, and wish they didn’t have to do.

A reason I joined the HomeRF Working Group as their marketing chairman back in the mid-1990s (before Wi-Fi) was because I was so impressed with Intel’s Ethnographic Market Research. They would send a team of (1) psychologist, (2) anthropologist, and (3) sociologist into homes to study their activities and values. They did NOT send technicians! And their research fed into a Market Requirements document that then fed into a Technical Requirements document and guided standards development and the HomeRF specification.

Another example of where NOT to get market requirements comes from IBM’s PC business. IBM had little success in consumer markets because it would ask retailers what features should be included in the next PCs, as if they knew. This meant that IBM got the same answers as all other PC manufacturers, from retailers that didn’t really know either.

So why did IBM have such great success with its ThinkPad line of laptop PCs? The ThinkPad team looked to IBM Research for product ideas (e.g. TrackPoint mouse replacement, Butterfly keyboard, and a hard disk with accelerometer to detect a fall and retract R/W heads before hitting the ground). ThinkPad market research all started with understanding user behavior and needs, followed by testing prototypes with customers to see if those needs were met.

Home Control in the Year 2020?

In the following video (from CES 2017?), Mitchell Klein, Executive Director of the Z-Wave Alliance, speaks to members of the Custom Electronic Design & Installation Association (CEDIA) about trends affecting their industry. He makes a compelling case that embedded smarts in the Internet of Things (IoT) is changing the landscape and industry leadership.

My issue with Klein’s presentation, like so many others I’ve seen, is that what’s trending and technically possible often is not yet a “must have” desire, and that’s what it will take to cross the chasm from market niche to mainstream adoption. Klein gives insight into what will be possible in 2020, but predicting market adoption still seems elusive.

I hope you were able to watch this with a bit of skepticism, and maybe you noticed that he cited market research from several different companies, cherry-picking the most positive projections. He did, however, touch on many of the drivers of market adoption, but he failed to address the inhibitors. That can be critical, I learned, after writing a major market research report on Home Controls in 2004 for Parks Associates. The chart below shows what I saw as the opportunity if only the Home Control market could Cross the Chasm separating market niche in high-end new homes (just 68K in 2002) and mainstream adoption in the 100+ million occupied U.S. households. Needless to say, we still have not crossed that chasm to mass market Smart Home adoption, and I’m not holding my breath.

Smart Home adoption is elusive since a Chasm separates the niche of High-end New Homes and a Mass Market

I very much like Beacon Agency’s view of this market, looking at the service model instead a collection of partially connected but rather dumb products that quickly go obsolete as tech innovation evolves exponentially.

Above is a look at some of the many smart home gadgets on display at CES 2019. But that’s the point: they’re still just gadgets. Where’s the integration between devices, platforms, and voice interfaces? And as with placing new tech in refrigerators and other appliances designed to last decades, that obsolescence problem is amplified in homes designed even longer.

Still Looking for a Brilliant Solution

Smart Home market adoption would accelerate if homebuilders took the same approach as car manufacturers, meaning they’d do all the tech research for the buyer and integrate solutions seamlessly into the end product (car or home). Thankfully, Brilliant is working with builders to do that. Their challenge is contending with different voice interfaces (Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit with Siri) and different network standards and automation platforms for lighting, security, HVAC, and all the other subsystems. At least someone is finally looking at that, but I still have two main issues with their system.

OBSOLESCENCE – Rapid advancements in computer, networking, display, and storage technologies enable new features at lower cost each year, making slightly older products obsolete more quickly than ever before. That’s why I’ve been critical of the smart refrigerator with touch screen display on the door, when an iPad could do even more and with the flexibility of being portable. You really don’t need to replace your perfectly good fridge so you can add a touch screen. Adding technology to homes has the same challenge. While appliances are designed to last a decade or more, homes are built to last much longer, at least through their 30-year mortgage. What technology will you want in 2030, 2040, or 2050? Will you have to change out wall controls again each time?

VALUE ADD – From past experience, I’m skeptical that smart home technologies will increase the perceived value of new and resale homes, and I think it may even detract. I introduced IBM to the Smart Home market in the early 1990s, but after selling my fully automated home several years later, with about $10K invested, I was surprised that the buyer hired an electrician to remove it all. They just wanted something simpler like the light switches they were used to – so much for added value. What about families committed to Apple and Siri? Will they justify paying a premium for a home based on Alexa, or Google Home?

Ideally, Brilliant’s system would work equally well with all smart home platforms and in small apartments, assisted living facilities, and multi-story million dollar homes. But the installation challenges and application usage is different in these markets. If Brilliant can get there, that would be a huge plus that would help drive market adoption. While their focus is still on automation rather than AI-based smart learning, they do seem to be addressing some of the issues I write about as a digital home consultant after retiring from IBM.

For Better or Worse?

Smart Home technologies have great potential for eldercare and others, but we must watch out that tech innovation doesn’t get in the way of our daily lives. I close this article with a funny look at what could happen if developers don’t keep the user experience in mind.

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2 Comments

  1. For baby boomers the RCA Whirlpool miracle kitchen was a step back in time listening to the sales woman talking about the domestic concerns of a housewife!!
    How times have changed, especially with all the ready made take out food that eliminates shopping for ingredients, keeping food fresh, cooking it, messing up the kitchen and dishes, and other concerns she covers e.g. bending down to get onions or potatoes out of the lower bin of a refrigerator. When you reach the age where you can’t bend down to pick up an onion, you’re probably not cooking at all. I got such a kick out of this youtube!! I cook and many of us do out of economic necessity (and because I like the food I cook), but then we’d be least likely to have the money for such elaborate technology. I can’t even imagine what someone would do when it starts to break down! And you know it would.

    The camera part does exist for parents with babies and the fast cooking reminded me of microwaves. Of course if someone wants a television in the kitchen, it’s not hard to do. I would give an eye tooth for something that cleaned the kitchen floor and I think the robotics are out there, but again how expensive is it.

    Your point is well made. We don’t live the way we once did and it is far more important to analyze what we do than to simply invent sophisticated technology in a vacuum, far removed from actual human behavior. An ala carte approach seems most likely as people care about different things and would probably want the option to pick and choose.

  2. RELATED ARTICLES:

    Matter’s Plan to Save the Smart Home (Verge, 12/28/2021) Matter is a new [networking] standard that promises to fix smart home interoperability — but can it deliver? This well-researched article is written with a healthy amount of skepticism, showing just how elusive the “Smart Home” vision has been.

    Six Tips To Consider Before You Invest In a Home Automation System Today (9/26/2022) The author, Jerry Del Colliano, comes from a high-end audiophile perspective rather than as a regular consumer but still offers useful advice. Unfortunately, I was unable to add a comment pointing to my article here, including my own lessons learned.

    Big Tech sign-up to make smart home standards (12/19/19) Apple, Amazon and Google are joining forces with the Zigbee Alliance to form the Connected Home over IP project to create universal standards for the smart home ecosystem.

    MY RESPONSE: While one developer picks Wi-Fi for wireless connectivity, others pick Bluetooth or Zigbee, but they may just as easily pick ANT+, X-10, Insteon, HomePlug, Z-Wave, or another “standard.” One thing that could help make sense of This Smart Home Mess is some sort of residential gateway device or service to interface between remote monitoring services and in-home sensors and devices using different network standards. Will that be a PC, tablet, smartphone, TV set-top box, or a specialized device? There’s likely no one answer, and the choice may depend on (1) the Rent vs. Buy business model and (2) the need to interoperate with other subsystems such as home security, HVAC, lighting, security, cameras, sprinklers, medical devices, etc.

    Not So Smart Home? The 3 Hardest ‘Smart Home’ Devices To Install (Forbes, 11/19/19) Hardest install: thermostats, security cameras, security sensors. Easiest: smart speakers.

    The state of the smart home in 2017 (good summary)

    Helpful Home vs Smart Home: What You Need to Know (8/22/2019) I like the premise of this article: that the ability to learn and adjust automatically goes beyond home automation with new voice interfaces. I agree that “smart home” is an over-used term, but “helpful home” may confuse things more. I’d prefer to just distinguish between a home that’s automated versus one that’s truly smart. This article approaches my view of that smart home.

    The Future of Voice First Technology and Older Adults (25-page market research report in PDF form)

    To Invade Homes, Tech Is Trying to Get in Your Kitchen (NYTimes, 3/25/2018)

    We’re Losing the War for the Smart Home

    Jumping on the Internet of Crap Bandwagon

    CES 2015: AllSeen Alliance to bring order to the Internet of Things (I commented with skepticism.)

    The home of the future, available today (I commented with skepticism.)

    Home Automation Report: Has the DIY Smart Home Bubble Burst? (CEPro Magazine, I commented)

    The Trouble With Home Automation in Retail (CEPro Magazine, I commented)

    Car History: Get a Horse (This is an interesting parallel with similar skepticism and showing the importance of understanding and meeting market demands, or at least creating them.)

    Ask the CNET Smart Home editors: What smart home tech would you want in your own home?

    CNET Smart Home They bought a house in Louisville dedicated solely to smart home product testing & reviews.

    Opinion: Why Apple needs a dedicated HomeKit app (I commented)

    The More Your Kitchen Evolves, The More It Stays The Same (DigitalTrends.com)

    The Most Over-Hyped Technologies in Healthcare (The Medical Futurist)

    Connected Home Solutions are Still in Early Adoption Phase

    Don’t let your smart home become a Monster House (and ruin your love life)

    IoT at home: 700 million smart connected homes expected by 2020

    DON’T BELIEVE WHAT YOU READ IN THIS ARTICLE.
    COMMENT: If one thing is clear to me here, it’s that Garner researchers have no clue what they’re talking about but are trying to sound like they do so they can sell their market research and consulting services.

    Just because something can be remotely operated or programmed to operate automatically doesn’t make it smart. To be truly “smart,” a device (or a home) must “learn,” but from what we’ve seen so far even learning devices can be quite stupid. Take the NEST thermostat as an example. It supposedly learns your habits & preferences to adjust temperature automatically, but it doesn’t know if you’re cold because you just ate ice cream or hot because you just vacuumed. So you have to adjust the temp manually – how stupid is that? You see, any change of behavior, however small, means smart home devices must be reprogrammed or retaught. That’s not very smart and an impediment to mass-market adoption.

    The reality of the Smart Home marketing hype, and the promise of this “next big thing,” has eluded us for over 50 years, and I see no sign that it’s much closer now than during the 1957 World’s Fair demo of the RCA-Whirlpool Miracle Kitchen. (See https://www.mhealthtalk.com/elusive-smart-home/.)

    The article speaks of smart appliances, but for the most part it makes no sense to put much electronics in white-goods home appliances that otherwise have a useful life of 10-15 years, because the electronics themselves will go obsolete every year or two, and there are far cheaper & better ways to add the functionality developers think we want. (See https://www.mhealthtalk.com/smart-refrigerator/.)

    The article also says, “the gateway is becoming the ‘centre’ for connecting the different devices and home appliances,” but that promise has also been around for more than 15 years. The first work to define gateway standards began with a whitepaper I helped write while still at IBM, and earlier gateways existed before that. (See http://www.slideshare.net/waynecaswell/intersection-gateways and https://mhealthtalk.com/cazitech/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/RG-report1.pdf).

    Some of the gateway standards of that era included TIA TR41.5 (a telecom standard), OSGI (Open Service Gateway initiative), and HomeRF (a now-defunct wireless standard that once dominated the home network market before being replaced by Wi-Fi. (see https://mhealthtalk.com/cazitech/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/Gateways2.ppt).

    Smart homes for beginners (Popular Science, I commented.)

    The House That Learns: How AI Makes Smart Homes Smarter (HuffPost, I commented)

    Microwaves will be obsolete by 2027. Here’s what’s going to replace them (DigitalTrends.com) I commented…

    Here’s an example of a sensationalist headline designed to grab your attention with a wild and completely false claim. It reminds me of over-blown marketing hype of the Smart Home being “the next big thing” – an aspirational claim that has been made for over 50 years but with relative little progress, at least compared to the promise.

    Developers need to quit calling this an RF oven, because it still uses microwave radio technology to heat food, even if those waves are created by silicon chips instead of magnetrons, giving you more control over power levels.

    Microwaves are also RF ovens, and they use the same 2.4 GHz frequency used by Wi-Fi, just at much higher power levels. That particular radio frequency is a natural harmonic of water molecules in food like meat, and with enough power, the waves make the molecules vibrate, and its friction from that vibration that creates the heat.

    The use of RF technology in microwave ovens has long caused health concerns that leakage could affect human health. It can also interfere with home wireless networks operating on the same radio frequency (RF). The only thing new in this oven is how the radio frequencies are created, and both use radio frequencies, so don’t call this an “RF oven.” It’s just a fancy microwave oven.

    What ‘Smart House’ Got Right—and Didn’t—About the Future “The Disney Channel Original Movie, which turns 20 this month, predicted a world that in some ways resembles our present and in other ways looks far off.”

    As smart home market booms, builders see plug-and-play tech as a standard feature (7/22/2019) Brilliant, a smart home controller, is helping builders make high-tech a standard option for new homes.

    I found this article through the CABA NewsBrief (CABA member for >25 years) and found it refreshing. Brilliant hopes to address a main inhibitor of smart home mass market adoption – DIY installation difficulties with multiple competing standards and platforms – but it’s only part way there.

    I’ve long believed that market adoption would accelerate if home builders took the same approach as car manufacturers. That’s doing all the tech research for the buyer and integrating it seamlessly into the car. One big problem, however, is that even the home voice interface has competing standards (Alexa, Google Home, and Apple HomeKit with Siri), and then there’s lighting, security, HVAC, and all the other subsystems. My worry is that a family committed to Apple, for example, may find no premium value in a home preinstalled with Alexa-based technology. Worse is that Alexa integration may lessen the perceived value of the home itself.

    Ideally, Brilliant’s system would work equally well with all smart home platforms and in small apartments, assisted living facilities, and multi-story million dollar homes. If they can get there, that would be a huge plus that could help drive market adoption. While their focus is still on automation rather than AI-based smart learning, they do seem to be addressing some of the issues I write about.

    How smart homes are becoming the self-care hubs of tomorrow I enjoyed Ian’s article on Smart Homes for many reasons. The concept of “a home that keeps its residents healthy” is already being adopted by some in the homebuilding industry, and this could help accelerate smart-tech market adoption. Beyond improved health, consider the impact a healthy home can have on one’s earning capacity, and how that prospect gives healthy home designs higher value.

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