Home Awareness: Delivering Value with Digital Convergence in the Home
HomeHeartbeat™, a new smart-home platform from Eaton, takes a refreshingly “pervasive” perspective on home technology and underscores the importance of first-mover advantages in a networked world.
This issue of Currents is excerpted from a new Harbor white paper on Home Awareness.
Download the full paper in printable PDF format (524 KB).
(See our terms of use.)
| HomeHeartbeat™ Key-Fob Docked on its Base Station |
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The key-fob can be docked onto the base station or onto any system sensor, acting as a tear-off display for all system components.
Source: Residential Products Division, Eaton’s electrical business
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Defining a New Market Meta-Category
The term “convergence” implies unification, but you wouldn’t know it from today’s home technology market—a fragmented landscape full of narrow point-solutions, time-sink gadgetry, entertainment obsession, and software/platform incompatibility.
Amid all the noise and clutter, a forthcoming smart-home platform from Eaton finally takes a “pervasive” approach to digital tools in the dwelling. HomeHeartbeat™ enables consumers to add simple, unobtrusive remote monitoring to ordinary household devices and systems. It treats all homeowner concerns—from comfort and convenience to safety and security—as a single problem that can be addressed by a single, scaleable solution. In taking this perspective, Eaton has defined a new market meta-category with vast potential: Home Awareness.
The Future that Never Happened
Visions of the “Home of the Future” have been in abundant supply for decades now. Buckminster Fuller, the famous creator of the geodesic dome (among many other things), was writing about the house as a “machine for living” as early as the 1930s. The “automated home” has been the dwelling place of futurist fiction characters since at least the 1950s, the subject of blueprints and schematics in Popular Mechanics and Popular Electronics, and a feature attraction at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York City, where visitors were transported through the “Home of Tomorrow” complete with domestic robotics and the perennially imminent videophone.
Since the 1964 World’s Fair, waves of promises about the “connected home,” the “networked home,” and “the digital home” have emerged every few years. The software industry has a term for such promises: vaporware. In the typical American home, products and systems are no more connected today than they were in 1964.
WE’VE HAD A LONG HISTORY OF RESIDENTIAL FUTURISM. until now, ALMOST NOTHING REAL HAS COME OF IT.
Consumers consequently now view the “intelligent home” as a mere merchandising slogan for bewildering and useless capabilities such as having your toaster talk to your microwave—capabilities that often turn out not to be real anyway. For consumer product companies, the phrase “home automation” has become so discredited that it now provokes fear and loathing rather than visions of glorious innovation.
Yes, we’ve had a long history of residential futurism. But to date, almost nothing of real significance has come of it—except a lot of naysaying and ridicule.
Here We Go Again
Now that always-on broadband Internet connections and short-range wireless LANs and PANs are common, the smart home is once again a hot topic. The underlying thinking, however, is not much different than it was in 1964.
Today’s discussions of next-generation home networking focus almost exclusively on the intrusive, resource-intensive, human-centric possibilities—in other words, on things that look good in marketing campaigns. The most popular current visions are all about media and entertainment, including video-on-demand, video-chat, voice-over-IP, and wirelessly integrated home theater.
Such things are perfectly valid high-bandwidth applications, and they will develop as network infrastructure evolves to support them. But focusing on them today as first-order business amounts to grabbing the wrong end of the technological stick. They steal the limelight and eclipse equally important possibilities that do not require intense network resources and bandwidth.
M2M, Not Entertainment, Is the Next Era of Home Technology
For pervasive computing applications, the significant feature of broadband connections is not their bandwidth (they require very little) but their “always-on” characteristic. The significant feature of the applications is not their gee-whiz factor (such as streaming high-definition video over the Internet) but precisely the opposite: the great convenience and service offered by their near-invisibility.
With a wireless LAN in the home, virtually any electronic product can automatically send a periodic signal about its status, with no human intervention or understanding needed. This may not be a dramatic application of intelligence and connectivity, but it is indisputably a highly useful one.
the opportunities created by networked smart devices will dwarf those of the human-centric pc era.
In the long run, such “invisible” machine-to-machine (M2M) applications will be much more important to business—and to the evolution of civilization—than dramatic and intrusive services that require human attention to deliver full value.
Eaton HomeHeartbeat™: Home Networking That Works
HomeHeartbeat™ is a low-bandwidth, machine-to-machine (M2M) platform that defines the market for scaleable, add-on device monitoring in the home.
What preys upon homeowners’ peace of mind? What aspects of their home environment do they really worry about? What technology would they embrace if it could ease those worries? These are the issues that drove the development of Eaton’s new product.
Eaton describes the product and its capabilities as “Home Awareness.” Another term might simply be “Peace of Mind technology.”
| Projected Growth of Wireless Sensors in the U.S. Home |
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The installation of wireless sensor nodes in U.S. homes will increase dramatically. In the case of Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™, each of the product’s wireless sensing modules would be considered a “node.”
Source: Harbor Research, Inc. & U.S. Census Bureau
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How Home Awareness Works
Home Awareness is “the connected home” done right. It uses seamless computing and communications to provide painless peace of mind about the most valuable thing that most people own.
Home Awareness is not gadgetry; most of the time, you don’t even know it’s there. It offers only features you really need because it’s designed for what people really care about. It lets you decide how to apply those features. It lets you, not product manufacturers, decide how much of it you want. And it lets you do it right now.
No manufacturer offers a remotely monitorable space heater and we’re not recommending it. There’s little incentive to do so because a product like a space heater will not become a portal into a widening array of services. There’s even less in it for the consumer. What happens when you also want remote awareness of your electric garage door, your stove, your hot water heater, a hot halogen floor lamp, or burst pipes in your basement? Would you want separate connections and proprietary interfaces for all these things? How many user manuals do you want to read?
It makes great sense to add intelligence and networking to most ordinary products after the fact, with a single system and interface. Eaton saw this opportunity.
How does HomeHeartbeat™ make something like a space heater “aware”? A small, inexpensive sensing and communicating module is plugged into the wall outlet, and the space heater is plugged into that. The sensor, which detects whether or not the heater is drawing power, communicates its state to a wireless base station in the home, which in turn communicates with the user via low-cost text messaging to a mobile phone, pager, or other device, or via email.
Strategic Alliances and Great Design
Creative, far-sighted business alliances and partnerships will be one of the most important factors in the creation and acceptance of device networking solutions. To create HomeHeartbeat™, Eaton partnered with two pioneers: MAYA Design, Inc. of Pittsburgh for the industrial design and software, and Ember Corporation of Boston for the wireless connectivity.
The right business alliances will be critical to the creation and acceptance of device networking solutions.
The “face” of HomeHeartbeat™ takes the form of a key-fob—an object to which you attach your keys. Sticking with the metaphor, the HomeHeartbeat™ fob resembles an oversized electronic key. The beauty of its design suggests that Eaton and MAYA took a page from the book of Apple Computer: Many consumers will find the key-fob reminiscent of Apple’s iPod™.
Like the latest iPods™, the HomeHeartbeat™ key-fob has only one control: a scrollable, clickable wheel-button. You hold the key-fob in one hand and operate it with one thumb. You can easily scroll through all the sensors on your HomeHeartbeat™ network in seconds.
| Eaton HomeHeartbeat™ Key-Fob System Monitor |
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The key-fob’s design is reminiscent of the Apple iPod™. One thumb-operated control allows you to scroll quickly through all the sensors on a HomeHeartbeat™ mesh-network and then click to select one.
Source: Residential Products Division, Eaton’s electrical business
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Delivering Value and Protecting Investment
In their consumer research, Eaton and MAYA found that homeowners cared most about dangerous system failures such as ruptured water heaters, gas leaks, and the presence of smoke. Second on the list was concern about family members. Is a child who should be doing homework watching TV? Is a memory-impaired parent using the stove? Is a pet out of food or water?
With the exception of potentially catastrophic events such as smoke or water leaks, remote awareness mattered more than remote control to surveyed homeowners. As a result of this research, most sensors in the initial release of HomeHeartbeat™—electrical on/off, window or door open/closed, smoke/carbon monoxide, and timed reminder—are designed for awareness, not control.
surveyed Homeowners cared more about awareness than control.
Even the first shipments of HomeHeartbeat™, however, will also include a mechanism that shuts off the water supply if a leak is detected—a welcome “peace of mind” boost as well as a demonstration that significant control is possible.
Eaton’s first-mover advantage in Home Awareness is notably strengthened by the flexibility of HomeHeartbeat™. The system delivers real value today, but it was also conceived as a foundation for rapid development of new functionality. Eaton intends to have the evolution of HomeHeartbeat™ driven by consumer demand, not by internal top-down decisions.
ZigBee™ Wireless Networking
Eaton’s HomeHeartbeat™ comes ready for the new ZigBee™ (IEEE 802.15.4) wireless networking standard. ZigBee™ is the low-power, device-oriented cousin of Wi-Fi® (IEEE 802.11) and Bluetooth. Wi-Fi connects laptops and PDAs with a lot of bandwidth. Bluetooth provides moderate bandwidth for connecting devices such as keyboards, mice, game controllers and cell phones to computers and game consoles. In contrast, ZigBee™—which may well prove to be the missing piece of the wireless device networking puzzle—connects small, embedded sensors and transmitters that don’t need much bandwidth, but that do need long battery life, built-in network security, and scaleability.
ZigBee™ is a major advance over earlier approaches to wireless device networking, and will be a crucial enabler throughout this decade, not only in the home, but in many other markets as well.
Zigbee™ may well prove to be the missing piece of the wireless device networking puzzle.
Ember Corporation, creator of the RF chip at the heart of HomeHeartbeat™, holds a seat on the ZigBee™ Alliance board, where the new standard is being designed and finalized. Though Eaton will begin shipping HomeHeartbeat™ before the ZigBee™ specification is finalized and published, the Ember partnership ensures that Eaton’s home awareness platform will be fully ZigBee™ compliant.
Getting There First
In this decade, networked smart devices will transform public and private life more than any computing development since the PC. But many companies find it difficult to envision the impact, and they are reluctant to embrace an embryonic development in the face of technological and competitive uncertainties. Even companies that understand M2M, and know that it will radically change their business models, are waiting for the phenomenon to “shake out” or “get safe.”
for technology adopters, the risk of “standing pat” is now greater than the risk of taking action.
This posture is a major mistake. We believe that the risk of staying out is now greater than the risk of getting in. Networking changes everything, and the first-mover advantages in many markets will be close to incalculable.
Once device networking begins to be adopted in a market, it will create significant barriers to vendor-switching because suppliers will become deeply involved in adopter operations and new business models, and adopters will become deeply involved in their customers’ lives throughout the product life-cycle. While we don’t believe there will be a Microsoft of pervasive computing, we do believe that early action will obstruct entry by the laggards and will enable companies to effectively own pieces of markets.
In a volatile environment of rapidly evolving technologies and opportunities, strong leadership will require having the vision and courage to act in defining new markets and models.
Eaton has long held a prominent position in the residential electrical market, but the company’s existing products are most often found in the utility room or the basement. With HomeHeartbeat™, Eaton makes a powerful bid to move from the utility room to the living room. HomeHeartbeat™ is Eaton’s new beachhead in the home, and we see no significant corresponding activity by the company’s direct competitors.
This issue of Currents is excerpted from a new Harbor white paper on Home Awareness.
Download the full paper in printable PDF format (524 KB).
(See our terms of use.)
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