How Will Home Automation Be in the Future?

In recent years, home automation has become popular and more accessible to more homeowners. If this were a different decade, you’ve probably thought of home automation as something that could only be found in commercial establishments and expensive homes.

With the rapid development of technology and the growing accessibility of Internet connection, home automation is available to almost anyone. Such technologies have become increasingly accessible that even hobbyists could make their own smart home devices from scratch with minimal programming.

Today, we’ll be talking about the possibilities and prospects of home automation in the coming years. With smart home devices like Google’s Alexa becoming an integrated part of the household, what else could this trend bring to our homes?

1. Home Automation and the Internet of Things

Home automation works on the concept of the Internet of Things (IoT). To put IoT simply, this is a system of devices that are interconnected to the same network. Through this network, devices can send and receive data to perform certain functions. Let’s make it simpler by visualizing an example.

The basic concept of IoT technology involves one device that will send a command (similar to that of the remote control), one device to receive that data, also known as the smart device, and your router. Now let’s replace these with familiar objects. Your remote control could be your smartphone or tablet, while your smart device could be a smart wireless plug. Because they are both connected to the Internet, you can send an “on” or “off” command to your smart plug so that you can turn it off even if you’re not physically present in your home.

The concept works the same way when several smart devices are connected to the network. Because each device has a unique IP address, you can send separate commands to different devices, even if you’re using the same smartphone or tablet as your remote control.

There are already a lot of smart home devices available on the market today, from security cameras, smart locks, light controllers, and many more. But if you want to try building one from scratch, you could try looking at micro-controllers like Arduino and Raspberry Pi and their compatible devices. While it would take some coding, there are numerous tutorials available online.

2. Home Automation Trends in 2020

The trend of home automation has been reaching more homes in the past few years, and it looks like smart home technologies are going to be an integrated part of a typical house very soon. Here are some of the trends that we’re seeing for home automation in the coming years.

3. Efforts in Standardization

Because of the increasing accessibility of smart home devices, you see various suppliers offering them left and right. While increased availability is good, we don’t really know if all these devices will work on various platforms. The lack of standardization also causes some users to stick to an Internet service provider even if they can’t get their value for money out of their services. This happens if the user can’t get a tool to work nicely on their preferred platform.

Aside from that, since a lot of these commercial smart home devices are not open-source, users might also feel overwhelmed with the various apps they have to download to make these devices work.

These are a few of the reasons why manufacturers have to make sure that their devices work on different platforms and standards. The good news is, manufacturers like Apple, Google, and Amazon are planning to work together to establish standards in smart home devices.

4. Smarter Devices in the Next Decade

We often think that remotely controlling your home locks via your tablet or smartphone is as smart as a home automation system gets. But in recent years, devices are getting smarter with the use of technologies such as machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing.

With these technologies serving as part of the brain of these devices, smart devices become actually smart by taking note of human behavior. We’ve seen these in some devices like Nest and Honeywell’s smart thermostat or those smart refrigerators that let you see what’s inside. Sources note that we’ll see more smart home devices with these technology integrated into their systems in the next decade.

5. Domestic Robots

While we won’t see something similar to Rosie, the Robot Maid from The Jetsons in the near future, domestic robots are also becoming quite common to more households.

It started with robotic vacuum cleaners and lawnmowers, and now, artificial intelligence is being explored for other domestic tasks as well. Soon, robots can now be used for tasks like cooking, cleaning, providing companionship, and healthcare. Experts predict that this technology will become more accessible and affordable in the coming years because several manufacturers are already working on these products.

6. Healthcare at Home

Another trend we’ll see in the next years will be the ubiquity of smart devices that monitors healthcare at home. On the preventive side, we’re already familiar with smartwatches that track our physical activities, nutrition levels, and sleep. Meanwhile, other devices connect users to their healthcare providers remotely and even diagnose illnesses using artificial intelligence.

The great thing about having smart devices for healthcare is that it lessens the need for outpatient visits to the hospital, and hospital resources could be focused on urgent cases. What’s more, vital stats and data could be collected from a patient’s natural environment as compared to a stressful environment like a hospital.

7. Faster Networks, Smarter Homes

With the upcoming rollout of 5G and an improved system in the WiFi 6, smart home devices would be able to process bigger data at a faster rate.

While 5G is currently available in select locations in the United States only, it is set to revolutionize how smart devices work. With this technology, devices would now be connected to the Internet without having to use wired connections with minimal power consumption. What’s more, a 5G connection also lets you connect more devices to the network. This latest development is especially useful for areas that are heavily saturated with devices competing for bandwidth. Meanwhile, WiFi 6 will let us handle devices that are competing for network access simultaneously.

On the one hand, these technologies will let devices transfer data between devices or between a device and the cloud at a faster rate. But on the other hand, it also means that the smart home devices could now handle bigger chunks of data at more rapid streams. In short, these devices could utilize more sophisticated software to become more adapted and reliable in our daily lives.

The Verdict

With the growing accessibility of an Internet connection and the affordability of devices in the future, home automation will become the norm in the coming years. On the surface level, it merely seems that machines are taking over our tasks as humans. But on the bright side, letting machines take over some of these domestic tasks frees up our time and let us focus on more important things.

From standardization in manufacturing to the smarter machine processing to the coming of 5G and WiFi 6, there are a lot of prospects and possibilities for home automation in the coming years. We might not be in the age of flying cars yet, but the trend of home automation is indeed amazing.