Smart Home is a term refers modern homes that have electric appliance, lighting and home security, home entertainment electronic devices that can be controlled by the user remotely via a smart home mobile app. Smart Home adoption are increased significantly with the more people prefer the voice-activated assistant devices like Amazon Echo, Google Home , Apple HomePod. These speakers are a great start points to help people to control their smart home devices.
Speakers including built-in smart features and virtual assistants powered by artificial intelligence command the smart home market. The voice assistant is getting more traction with Covid-19, without even touch any lighting physical light switch user can control home lighting just via a simple voice command through the familiar user friendly interface. Amazon’s smart speakers are routinely the most frequently bought, with 15.6 million units shipped in fourth quarter of 2019 alone. As of July 2020, the number of smart home devices compatible with Amazon’s virtual assistant, Alexa, amounted to 100 thousand devices. The number of Alexa-compatible smart home devices increased exponentially since 2017, where it was at four thousand.
What are key benefits of smart home offering ?
The appeal of the smart home is that it enables owners to remotely control parts of the home and configure time schedules for smart home-enabled devices to help control costs and be more energy-efficient. For tech savvy users, the attractiveness of smart home is simplicity and convenience. It would be great all their devices can be controlled with a universal interface or single app. That is all major technology platforms supplier competes for. It is very critical for them to be the first choice when customer to begin their journey on smart home. The customer need to decide on which smart home platform they would like to go with and start adding more devices in the Eco system.
Smart Lighting(lights and switches) is only one application case in the smart home devices universe. Lighting manufactures face the challenges to design lighting fixtures to accommodates the most available smart home platform. This expectation definitely increase the design and validation work for product development to meet the technical and security requirements from technology providers like Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung.
For home users to integrated Smart Lighting into the smart home system, they have two different ways to implement. First is retrofit existing lighting system by adding smart Switch(Dimmers) to convert it into smart and connected fixture. The second way is buy new lighting fixture with smart connect feature built in.
Smart Switch is readily available in the market with vendors from Lutron, Leviton etc. The switch is typically easy to install offer both physical wall switch and mobile app control. They can also connect to supported smart home devices. The major challenge with this solution is the lighting fixture and switch compatibility. Smart switch with built in phase dimming may be incompatible with certain led lighting fixtures and cause issues like flickering or can not dim to lower level. It typically fall to either lighting or switch manufacture’s responsibility to provide a compatible smart switch dimmer list or compatible light fixture list to customers when they made purchase choices.
The second way is smart lighting fixture with built in wireless control features. One good example of this is Philips Hue light bulbs. Hue Lights work with the Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa. The light can be controlled on/off, dimming via its own app or support Google Home and Amazon Echo devices.
There are also other types of smart lighting fixture for smart home : like recessed down lighting fixture, light strips, surface mount fixtures, outdoor lighting.
Most of the smart lighting use Bluetooth ,Z-Wave, ZigBee or WiFi wireless network technology. Here is a comparison chart of these network technologies.
Google Assistant platform uses Wi-Fi and z-wave network. Apple HomeKit also uses existing Wi-Fi network to manage smart connected devices without a need for a hub. Amazon Alexa and Samsung SmartThings hub can connect to a variety of other smart home products because of its support for several smart home communications protocols, including Z-Wave and ZigBee.
The smart lighting will place a great role in the smart home system as there is need to seamlessly integrate lighting control into home entertainment system with application of colorful assent light to match the scene of theater mode on Smart TV, or sync the lighting with music rhythms. The communication between types of devices ( lighting, TV, speaker etc) will become important. We will need to create large-scale home networks capable of supporting secure, reliable communication between tens, hundreds, or thousands of devices.
