Smart homes have been talked about for decades, but beyond a few concept houses and a few gadget-happy homeowners, little has been achieved in making them a bricks-and-mortar reality. The TEAHA project team plans to enable all of us to call our house and tell it to start the laundry, fill the bath or crank up the heating.
“Until now the business model has not been clear, there have been too many different standards, and too many technologies that are not interoperable. And, most importantly, people did not see these systems as being user friendly – they were generally viewed as too complex to use and maintain for the benefits they offered,” explains project coordinator Enrique Menduiña of Telefónica I+D in Spain.
Numerous obstacles have hindered wider uptake of smart home systems. In part, this is a result of the multitude of different business actors involved when trying to interconnect home appliances with each other and to the wider world. To date, appliance manufacturers, telecommunications firms, utility companies, software designers and system installers have often taken very different paths toward deploying new technologies in the home.
The IST-funded project TEAHA brought companies from all those sectors together. The outcome, according to Menduiña, will be the first open smart-home platform to allow any home-device – using any technology and made by any manufacturer – to interoperate seamlessly with the Teaha system.
Making home appliances interoperable
“Having your television tell you when your laundry is done, or the dishwasher has finished, is just one application,” the TEAHA coordinator says.
Indeed, the concept of a smart home revolves around having many different appliances and devices running innumerable services. A security system incorporating a camera, for example, would alert you if anything abnormal occurs while you are away, while you could use a mobile phone or PDA to lower the blinds, lock doors or control the house temperature remotely.
“The applications and services that are now possible can do anything from simple automation to surveillance, security, climate control and entertainment,” Menduiña explains.
For the home to be smart, however, these different devices have to be interoperable. The TEAHA team achieves this interoperability by developing a middleware platform that mediates between different appliances and communication systems. It is based on a software gateway through which information from all the different devices passes, regardless of the network they are using. The platform further provides zero-configuration capability, i.e. appliances are automatically discovered as well as secure communication.
That is especially important because certain smart-home services are better suited to one type of communications system than to another. Broadband WiFi, for example, is ideal for interconnecting multimedia devices such as TVs and computers, but is less well suited to hooking up a simple smoke detector or intrusion alarm, for which a lower bandwidth network will suffice.
An open approach
To ensure interoperability, the system is based on standards developed by the Open Services Gateway initiative (OSGi), an approach that can easily be adopted by appliance manufacturers. “By taking an open approach, TEAHA avoids locking manufacturers into specific technologies. Instead it allows them to use a variety of technologies, thereby encouraging the development of different smart-home devices and appliances,” Menduiña says.
In that regard, the project is also researching two different but complementary methods of interconnecting devices within home networks. One is an advanced radio-frequency (RF) solution for transmitting information wirelessly between devices. The other is a system to send small packets of data between devices over power lines, thereby avoiding the need for new wiring.
The project partners are currently integrating the different components of the platform and are due to carry out extensive tests before the initiative ends in December 2006. Several of them, including Telefónica, are planning to use the results indirectly in soon-to-be launched commercial systems that will mark a step toward greater home networking in Europe.
In the 20 years since developments in microelectronics made the idea of smart homes a realistic objective, there have been many failed expectations. Now, Menduiña says, a real market for smart-home systems appears to be emerging. It will really take off, he argues, if the price of the technology is right and reliable and once consumers come to see “how smart homes will benefit them.”
Contact:
Enrique Menduiña
Telefónica I+D
C/ Emilio Vargas 6
E-28043 Madrid
Spain
Tel: +34 91 337 4722
Fax: +34 91 337 4004
E-mail: efmm@tid.es
Source: Based on information from TEAHA
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