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For example, real estate developer Capstone Partners has teamed
up with IoT startup IOTAS to offer smart home environment
for renters at Grant Park Village apartments in Portland, USA.
Apartments are equipped with different sensors in every room
which allows to monitor different aspects such as temperature,
humidity, lights, motion, and water flow. Systems track the habits
and preferences of the dwellers and enable renters to create
rules to customize their home environment from anywhere and
at anytime.
Home automation is IoT’s Promised Land. Several big companies
have understood it and invested large amounts in state-of-the
art innovation startups that develop products useful to automate
houses. For instance, Google acquired Nest Labs in January
2014, a connected thermostat producer, for 3.2 billion dollars.
Investing such quantity of money these types of products is for
the industry barons (Google, Microsoft, Samsung...) the step to
take in order to win a growing market full of possibilities.
The lack of imagination also does not seem to hit the home
automation market. There is always new products responding
to new desires, which stimulate the ongoing process to imagine
and create connected objects that could lead to better comfort
inside the house. The IoT market is continually growing because
of the huge audience targeted. Rodolphe Hasselvander, founder
of French startup Blue Frog Robotics which develops companion
and social robots called «Buddy», explains that a potential
market of tens of million robots is estimated by targeting families
with children in Europe and the United States.
In general, the home innovation market is full of oversized figures,
especially considering the future, where connected devices seem
to invade our daily life: the German market research organization
GfK estimates for instance that each French household will have
30 connected devices at home in 2020. According to a Gartner
study, there will be at the end of this year as many connected
devices (for consumers and businesses) as human beings on
Earth, and this number will reach 20 billion by 2020. Connected
devices for the consumer are in majority, representing today
more than 60% of the grand total and 5.2 billion products. Smart
TVs and connected TV boxes remain the most popular objects.
A risk of data overload?
The IoT might gather different objects but the promise is still
the same: to make our life easier and take care of our health
and security. However, the data mass that a consumer can
access to is also problematic. Checking each evening after work
the electric consumption, the number of steps he made, the
humidity rate and the temperature in his living room, added to
that the smartphone alarms warning him that the chicken in the
oven is ready can be too much to handle.
Moreover, according to a study from an ETH Zurich team, billions
of people connecting with billions of devices must require
evermore complex algorithms, which is a worry concerning
personal data security and the information within, which can be
manipulated by private or governmental institutions. ETH argues
then for clear and reliable information systems controlled by
the user. «For each connected device, you can replace the word
«intelligent» with vulnerable», warn Mikko Hyppönen, research
director of Finnish company F-Secure.
Anecdotal market or growing tree?
As the home innovation market started from the bottom, it is
perfectly normal to experience such a growing trend. However,
according to GfK, IoT represents only 1% of the home appliance
turnover. Even the buyers aren’t convinced: one out of three
doesn’t use it, as Gartner revealed in a study in December 2016.
Many connected objects do not bring any value and innovation
has sometimes to face failures.
However, the IoT revolution will probably happen through
several generations. The creation of the OpenFog Consortium
in December 2015 aims at accelerating this revolution and
dealing with the issues of treating big amount of data from IoT
applications by avoiding the process of cloud computing. This
decentralization of data collection called «fog computing» will
bring intelligence and security, which could attract the most
reluctant ones.
BEAST MAGAZINE #8