Redefining 'home automation'
Source: EE Times
It took the industry over 35 years to find the winning formula to bring low-cost, user friendly, home automation technology to the masses. It was not for lack of trying. For years, companies churned out innovative technologies designed for the smart home, from hardware to software. But standards – the key to technology and connectivity scaling – proved elusive. Until now. The critical missing pieces have now fell into place.
These include Virtual hardware, Matter, Cassini, microservice architecture, containers, and ML frameworks for the edge. These technology elements are coalescing to enable a truly dynamic period of innovation in the home – and it helps to have the backing of over 400 industry OEMs for the Matter protocol!
Central to this vision of scaling the smart home is the Home Automation-as-a-Service platform. This whitepaper provides a definition and an overview of the key technologies that underpin the design of such a platform, and key considerations when architecting one.
The global smart home market size is forecast to dump from $86.4 billion in 2020 to $380.5 billion in 2028, a CAGR of 21.1% during the period.
When it re-emerged as a concept in the past few years alongside IoT, the smart home – a connected, digital environment that made our lives so much easier, simpler, and safer – seemed like it would catch fire. First wave of adoption initially proved that point. Research firm Strategy Analytics reports that smart home device sales have more than doubled from $28 billion in 2015 to $63 billion in 2021, with devices now in 306 million households worldwide. The number of smart homes is forecast to reach 533 million by 2027.
But once voice became the standard user interface for relevant devices, the smart home should have become a mass market with hockey stick-like growth. It hasn’t; it’s being held back by several factors. One is the “home IT manager” problem. Early smart-home solutions evolved from several different ecosystems, but interoperability between products from different ecosystems proved tricky. In some cases, consumer choice has been limited by requiring devices from different sources to work in concert with various home hubs. Installing and operating a home automation system with different devices from different vendors requires a resident IT person.
Matter is a royalty-free home automation connectivity standard designed to make smart home devices from various ecosystem just work together simply and seamlessly. Started in 2019 and backed by over 400 companies including Amazon, Google, and Comcast, Matter-compatible products and software updates for existing products are expected to be released in the fall of 2022.
The Matter protocol puts an end to consumer confusion about which device works with which service. By agreeing on a unified secure control protocol, the industry has solved a long-standing problem that had blocked the market from reaching the mass deployment phase. Matter is a game-changer for developers and consumers and promises to propel the smart home market to a level of scale predicted long ago by removing the requirement for an IT expert in every home.
Matter deliverables: • Specification document • Software implementation • Compliance certification
Smart home device sales have more than doubled from $28 billion in 2015 to $63 billion in 2021, with devices now in 306 million households worldwide.
