Remote Control Arrives

When Bill Gates visited the Seattle Worlds Fair as a 6-year-old in 1962, he claims to have visited every pavilion. At the General Electric Living pavilion, he would have seen a vision of a digitized residence, with home computers, electronic libraries and television programming projected on the interior walls.

Fifty-four years later, most of us are still awaiting the arrival of the smart home a place where audio, video, lighting, temperature, window coverings and other features can be centrally controlled or, even better, remotely controlled through a portable device. There are signs, however, that the smart home market may finally take off, driven by the ubiquity of enabling technologies like Wi-Fi, voice recognition and smartphones.

According to the Consumer Technology Association, smart home technologies are in place in only 6.4 percent of homes nationwide today but are expected to reach 15.5 percent by 2021. Revenue from smart home technologies is expected to grow by more than 25 percent each year, reaching more than $32 billion in 2021.

IoT Analytics, a market analysis firm, identifies four primary drivers behind the growing smart- home market.

Energy savings: more efficient use of lighting, heating and cooling through scheduling and sensing the presence of occupants.

Convenience: centralized control of disparate services.

Safety and security: Smart door locks, integrated video and motion detectors.

Social status: Increasing adoption of the latest technologies by Generation Y as they purchase homes.

Silicon Valley is the acknowledged hotbed for smart home device development, but the Seattle region is quickly positioning itself as a leader in smart home technologies, especially for the development of operating systems that control the devices.

Microsoft and Amazon are clearly intent on becoming leaders in the sector.

Amazon has been integrating its voice-controlled Echo and Echo Dot devices with a growing array of smart home products to control lighting, thermostats and other home systems. In September, South Koreas LG Electronics announced that it was partnering with Amazon to integrate its SmartThinQ hub, a device used to connect home appliances over the internet, to work with Echo. Ford Motor Co. said in early October that Echo will be integrated into three of its models the Focus Electric, Fusion Energi and C-Max Energi by the end of the year, allowing owners to do such things as adjust the heat in their homes from their cars.

Microsoft is reportedly positioning Windows 10 and Cortana, its voice-activated digital assistant, to be a controller of smart home devices. At a developers conference last April, the company announced that it would release protocols in 2017 to allow Windows 10 to work with a wide range of devices and applications allowing users to automate tasks using a PC, a mobile device or an Xbox console. According to the announcement, users will be able to control lights, air conditioning and door locks.

Other companies see opportunities here, too. The Los Angeles-based computer peripherals company Belkin recently moved its R&D office to Seattle, specifically to develop smart home technologies. Belkins move, not coincidentally, took place after the company bought Seattle-based Zensi in 2010. Zensi, which was founded by University of Washington Professor Shwetak Patel, focused on energy and water monitoring in the home. At the same time, Patel become Belkins chief scientist.

We moved all of R&D to Seattle so it is convenient to the University of Washington, says Patel, pointing out that the resources of the university and tech companies such as Microsoft and Amazon give the region a huge pool of talent for developing hardware, software and machine learning. Its just a better fit.

Derek Richardson, cofounder and CEO of Deako, a Seattle-based manufacturer of smart lighting systems, also established his company in Seattle to gain access to that talent pool. Its a tech city, he says, adding that the mountains and beautiful lakes are a draw, too. The venture community is growing here, and there are so many successful companies Amazon, Starbucks, Boeing, and the list goes on and on. Its a great way to attract talent.

Still, for all the media coverage of smart home technologies during the past half century, the pace of actually integrating those technologies into homes has been slower than some expected. For one thing, while the early generations of smart home technologies were fine for tech-savvy early adopters, they were not user-friendly enough for the average consumer. How do you get the technology to the average persons home, and how do you reduce the installation barrier? asks Patel. That is one of the big challenges the industry is facing right now.

Aaron Crandall, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Washington State University, says that for all the advances in technology, expectations have always outpaced reality. About a year and half ago, Crandall and a student licensed technology they had developed for a smart home in a box a system of sensors that detect movement, temperature, doors opening and closing designed to help caregivers for the elderly, and launched a company to develop and market it. We did about a year of pushing the boulder up the hill trying to get it funded, says Crandall. It didnt come together in the soup that needs to make a startup go.

Crandall says the market was not yet ripe for the technology. The technologies are still there. It will happen, he says. Its just a question of who is going to make it happen.

The market is being primed by specialized businesses taking on the tough and often costly job of integrating technologies to easily control lights, alarms and doorbells. Consumers and builders looking to integrate smart home technologies are turning to specialized system integrators.

Digital Home Northwest was launched by Jeffrey Thoren and his wife, Heather, in 2006 after they went through the experience of retrofitting their new home with smart lighting. We honed a technique after doing a couple of remodels on our own house, he says.

Most of Digital Home Northwests work is retrofitting existing buildings. The consensus among builders has been that they dont want to spend the money wiring houses for smart devices without knowing if the buyer will want them. But Thoren is trying to push builders to add wires that will later make it easier to install smart home systems.

If youre going to build something for a client in a high-tech city, you should be thinking about pre-wiring, he says. Adding a couple thousand dollars of wiring and just leaving it in the walls so it can be used really makes sense.

While Wi-Fi capability has become standard in the home, video cameras and motion detectors for security can easily eat up the bandwidth available.

Its a bucket, Thoren says of the basic wireless router, and the more devices that drink out of the bucket, the less water you have.

Craig Abplanalp, president of Definitive Audio in Bellevue, says he sees increasing demand for smart home technologies. His company has broadened its expertise from audio and video to include systems for controlling operations such as lighting, motorized window coverings, air conditioning and heating. Abplanalp says the companys work is split between new construction and retrofits.

Right now, there is a lot of new construction, he observes, but Seattle is somewhat landlocked [in terms of available land for new construction], so there is also a lot of retrofitting. A lot of the residential work is in a home that in many cases is being torn down to the studs. Its really a rebuild.

Abplanalp senses a big shift from the early days of the movement toward smart homes.

All of the pioneers in new technology use their early adopters as beta testers, he says. A lot of the products were really not ready for mass consumption.

He says that dynamic is changing. Where Definitive Audios specialists used to have to do a lot of custom programming to get systems to play nicely together, there are now free vendor apps that handle the tasks. What the average person will pay for programming is an ever-declining amount, Abplanalp asserts.

Industry insiders say that two emerging trends standardization and modular design are going to push smart home technologies to adoption by broader markets.

Deako, for example, designed its lighting system to work on standard house wiring, with communications between switches and the user control a smartphone taking place via Bluetooth. Our technology can work in any home as long as it has modern wiring, says Richardson.

Whats more, the Deako switches are modular, with all the smartness contained in the switch. A builder can install either dumb switches or smart switches in the Deako receptacle. This allows the builder, with minimal investment, to give the homebuyer the choice of upgrading to smart lighting.

Just as important, says Patel, is the move toward standardization, which makes it easier for consumers to get devices to work with each other. There are so many systems out there now and its hard to know which one to start with, and they dont all interoperate, says Patel. Consumers are overwhelmed.

Patel expects a lot more cooperation among companies in the industry to make their stuff more compatible. He points to a recent collaboration between Amazon and Sonos, a maker of high-end wireless speakers, as an example.

Patel says that one more thing is needed: a killer user experience. He says devices that let parents know when their kids get home or that remotely lock and unlock doors are the kinds of emerging technologies that will open broader consumer markets.

You have to get people hooked and get them thinking about what the real convenience factor is, Patel asserts. I think were just getting to that point.

Crandall believes one killer application may already have been created. Its just that consumers arent quite ready for it. Internet-connected smart home sensors and smartphone apps are ideal, he says, for monitoring the health of elderly people and helping them stay in their homes longer, rather than having to move into assisted living or nursing facilities.

But those people who are 70-plus right now own almost no smartphones, Crandall says, adding that they also often dont have internet connections in their homes.

The demographics, however, are changing. The largest age group in the United States by about 2030 will be 65-plus, Crandall says. We do not have the nurses and physicians to do classic senior care, so we need tools to keep people in their homes longer.

Since the next generation of seniors is more familiar with smartphones, Crandall expects smart home technology, especially as applied to elder care, to finally come into its own.