Internet of Things and Smart Home Technology

I. What is a Smart Home?

A smart home is one in which the various electric and Electronic appliances are wired
up to a central computer control system so they can either be switched on and off at certain times
(for example, heating can be set to come on automatically at 6:00AM on winter mornings) or if
certain events happen (lights can be set to come on only when a photoelectric sensor detects that
it's dark).
Example:
 Lights than can be set to light up when a photoelectric sensor detects that it’s dark.
 Heating can be set to come on automatically at 6:00 AM on winter mornings.
Most homes already have a certain amount of "smartness" because many appliances already
contain built-in sensors or electronic controllers. Virtually all modern washing machines have
programmers that make them follow a distinct series of washes, rinses, and spins depending on
how you set their various dials and knobs when you first switch on. If you have a natural-gas-
powered central heating system, most likely you also have a thermostat on the wall that switches
it on and off according to the room temperature, or an electronic programmer that activates it at
certain times of day whether or not you're in the house. Maybe you're hi-tech and you have
a robotic vacuum cleaner that constantly crawls around your floors sweeping the dust?
All these things are examples of home automation, but they're not really what we mean by
a smart home. That concept takes things a step further by introducing centralized control. In the
most advanced form of smart home, there's a computer that does what you normally do yourself:
it constantly monitors the state of the home and switches appliances on and off accordingly. So,
for example, it monitors light levels coming through the windows and automatically raises and
lowers blinds or switches the lights on at dusk. Or it detects movements across the floor and
responds appropriately: if it knows you're home, it switches light and music on in different
rooms as you walk between them; if it knows you're out, it sounds an intruderalarm.

II. How do Smart Homes work?

Plug-in X-10 modules

X10 is a communication protocol enabling communication between smart home devices.

Developed in 1975, the oldest and best-known smart home automation system is called
X-10 (sometimes written "X10") and uses your ordinary household electricity wiring to switch
up to 256 appliances on and off with no need for any extra cables to be fitted.

You plug each appliance you want to automate into a small control unit (usually called a
module) and plug that into an ordinary electrical power outlet. Using a small screwdriver, you
then adjust two dials on each module. One dial is what's called the house code and you set this to
be a letter from A through P. You can use the house code to link appliances together (for
example, so all the lamps on the first floor of your home can be controlled as a group). The other
dial is set so each individual appliance has a unique identifier known as its unit code, which is a
number 1–16. Next, you plug a central controller unit into another electrical socket and program
it to switch the various appliances on and off (identifying them through their codes) whenever
you wish.

The first system packaged was basic but effective:

 Command Console

 Appliance Module

 Lamp Module
All packets of data sent using the X10 protocol consists of 3 elements:

 4-bit House Code (A-P)

 4-bit Unit Code(s): (1-16)

 4-bit Command: (Binary number)

Here are examples of some of the most common functions and corresponding commands:

 All Units Off 0000

 All Lights On 0001

 On 0110

 Off 0111

 Dim 0100

 Bright 0101

How does it work?

 The central controller sends regular switching signals through the ordinary household
wiring, effectively treating it as a kind of computer network. Because these signals work
at roughly twice the switching frequency of ordinary AC power (which works at 50–
60Hz), they don't interfere with it in any way. Each signal contains a code identifying the
unit it relates to (a table lamp in your living room, perhaps, or a radio in your bedroom)
and an instruction such as turn on, turn off, or (for lamps) brighten, or dim. Although all
the control units listen out for and receive all the signals, a signal affects only the
appliance (or appliances) with the correct code. Apart from appliances that receive
signals, you can also plug in sensors such as motion detectors, thermostats, and so on, so
the system will respond automatically to changes in daylight, temperature, intruders, or
 whatever else you consider important. With most systems, you can also switch
appliances on and off with a handheld remote control (similar to a TV remote). The
remotes either send signals directly to each module using radio wave (RF) signals or
communicate with the central controller, which relays the signals accordingly.

X-10 has become an international standard for controlling appliances, but it's not the only system
that works this way.

How about the drawbacks of this aging protocol, though?

Minimal Functionality: In theory, X10 protocol allows you a fair degree of advanced control

from dimming through scene selection using extended message set. Unfortunately, support for

this is not compulsory so many of the cheaper X10 devices stick to the basic message set

Sluggish: Since with many X10 devices you’ll need to adjust light circuits individually,

operation can be rather slow

Interference: If any of your neighbors are using X10, you’ll likely get some interference. Other

RF wireless signals can also wreak havoc. In general, X10 delivers an often rocky ride

No Encryption: Since both X10 and RF protocols have no support for encryption, choose

another protocol if you’re concerned about security

Computer-controlled X-10 system

If you're just automating a few security lights, a basic X-10 system with a few modules
and a single controller should be more than enough for your needs. But if you want to run a more
sophisticated setup, with many different appliances coming on and off in all kinds of different
ways, you might want to use your home computer as the controller instead. That's easy too! You
buy an X-10 home computer interface kit comprising a module (which plugs into a power outlet
like any other module), an interface cable to connect the module to your computer (using either a
standard serial or USB port), and some software. Typical software shows a graphical
representation of all your appliances and lets you set on/off patterns for a day, a week, or even
longer. You can also create your own macros, so groups of appliances switch on and off in a
certain sequence at a certain time each day. There's X-10 software for both Windows
and Linux systems.

Wireless Internet system

Security is one of the biggest reasons why many people are interested in smart homes. If
you're away at work or on holiday, making your home seem lived in is a good way to deter
intruders. A basic X-10 system can turn the lights and the TV on and off at unpredictable times,
but if you really want to push the boat out on security, a wireless, Net-connected system is much
better. Effectively, it's a computer-controlled X-10 system with an interface you can access over
the Web. With a system like this, you can hook up webcams to watch your home (or your pets),
switch appliances on and off in real time, or even reprogram the whole system. Harmony Home
Automation is an example of a system that works like this.

DIY smart homes

Lots of people like simple, off-the-shelf, plug-and-play systems like X-10: buy it, take it
home, plug it in, and off you go. But plenty more of us are hobbyists, hackers, and geeks for
whom the very challenge of doing something is at least as important—sometimes more so—than
the thing we're trying to do. If you're one of these people, you're route to a smart home is more
likely to be through the hacker, maker, DIY community, maybe using something like
an Arduino microcontroller to link your computer to appliances around your home.

III. But do you really need a smart home?

You might think the idea of a smart home is frivolous and silly. Isn't it lazy and indulgent
to have a machine switching the lights on and off for you when you can do it perfectly easily
yourself? Bear in mind, though, that many elderly and disabled people, and those with special
needs, struggle with simple household tasks. Home automation could make all the difference
between them being able to live happily and independently in their own home or having to move
into expensive sheltered accommodation.

As the population ages, governments and medical charities are looking at home
automation with increasing interest: why not use computers, robots, and other technologies to
provide the support that vulnerable people need to keep them happy, healthy, and independent?
For example, people with dementia can have their homes fitted with automated sensors that
check whether cookers have been left on or taps have been left to overflow. Elderly people prone
to falling can have their homes fitted with lighting activated by motion sensors, so that if they get
up in the middle of the night they're not stumbling around dangerously in the dark. Blind people
can finally buy ordinary household appliances and use one simple computer controller,
programmed to suit their personal needs, to manage them all.

If you're elderly or disabled, home automation systems like this can make all the
difference to your quality of life, but they bring important benefits for the rest of us as well. Most
obviously, they improve home security, comfort, and convenience. More importantly, if they
incorporate energy monitors, such as thermostats, or sensors that cut the lights to unoccupied
rooms, they can help you reduce household energy bills; automated systems such as Bye Bye
Standby, which cut the power to appliances when they're not being used, can dramatically reduce
the energy wasted by appliances such as washing machines, dishwashers, and TVs when they're
not actually being used.
 Maybe you're still not convinced—and maybe you're right. Do you really need things like
this? Do you need to buy even more appliances just to control the ones you already have? Isn't it
just as easy to get into the habit of switching things off yourself? Gadgets that kill your TV's
standby mode sound cool, but how hard is it to pull out the plug? What about switching the TV
off altogether and reading a book? Or putting your games console away in the cupboard and
getting into the habit of taking walks in the country instead? And instead of going to great
lengths to wire up your house for while you're away on vacation, how about befriending the
neighbors and asking them to look out for you instead? For many of us, a house really is a
machine for living in—and if that's the way you like living, it's just fine. But it's important to
remember that there are plenty of alternatives to living that way as well. If small is beautiful and
simple is best, the smartest home might be one that has no gadgets at all!

Internet of Things

One of the things that makes people smart—smarter than all the other creatures who
creep, flap, hoof, and slither round the planet—is our ability to communicate with one another.
We can talk to other people, listen to them, and collaborate to achieve very complicated goals,
from finding cures for cancer to putting astronauts on the Moon. Even before the invention of
the Internet, people were intricately networked, right round the world; famously, according to
sociological theory, there are only six degrees of separation (six links) necessary to connect any
one person on the planet with any other.

Now what if gadgets and machines could talk to each other the same way? What if
an accelerometer embedded in a cardigan could automatically detect when an old person fell
down the stairs and telephone an ambulance? What if all the homes in the United States
had smart power meters that could signal energy consumption to utility companies in real-time?
Suppose car engines could monitor their own mechanical efficiency, and, if it fell below a certain
level, dial into a garage computer and be remotely tweaked back to some optimum level, all
without leaving our drives? What if highway control systems could measure and monitor cars
streaming down different routes at different times of day and automatically re-route traffic round
jams and snarl-ups? These things might sound fanciful, but they'd all become possible if the
machines in our homes, offices, and transportation systems could communicate with one another
automatically—if, in other words, there were a giant network of machines: An Internet of
things.

What is the Internet of Things?

People have been getting excited about this idea since it was originally suggested in 1999
by technology entrepreneur Kevin Ashton, then working in brand marketing at Proctor &
Gamble. He'd been researching electronic sensors and RFID tags (wireless printed circuits that
allow objects to identify themselves automatically to computer systems; they're used in library
self-checkouts) and, in a moment of insight, wondered what would happen if all kinds of
everyday objects and machines could communicate through a standard computer network.
Ashton realized his Internet of Things was a yellow-brick road to better efficiency and less waste
for all kinds of businesses.

In popular news articles, the Internet of Things is often explained by introducing a well-
known but frivolous and now rather hackneyed example. Suppose your refrigerator could use
RFID tags to detect what products it contained and how old they were. If it were linked to
the Internet, it could automatically reorder new supplies whenever it needed to. It sounds
harmless enough, but the infamous Internet fridge has actually become something of a distraction
from much more valuable applications: most of us are capable of keeping tabs on our sour milk
and moldy cheese, the argument goes, so what possible use could there be for an Internet of
Things? But suppose similar technology were being used to monitor elderly or disabled people
so they could continue to live safely, with independence and dignity, in their own homes? It's
easy to build a home that uses motion sensors to monitor when someone is regularly walking
around (intruder alarms have been using this technology for years), and not much harder to
monitor that data remotely. That's a much more persuasive example of how the Internet of
Things could prove really helpful to a society with a rapidly aging population.

Although people sometimes talk about the Internet of Things as though it's merely an
extension of smart home technology, it's actually a much bigger and more general idea. Imagine
our system for monitoring the elderly transplanted to a hospital and scaled up into a kind of e-
care, in which noncritical patients are routinely monitored not by nurse's observations but by
remotely gathered electronic sensors, communicating their measurements over a network. Or, to
take another example, what about automatically monitoring your home while you're on holiday
using sensors and webcams? If it works in a house, it works anywhere: for checking and
automatically restocking shelves in a supermarket, for remotely monitoring the
crumbling concrete on a highway bridge, or in a hundred other places.

How does it work?

Five basic things are needed to make the Internet of Things work.

1. The thing

First, there's the "thing" itself—which could be anything from a person or animal to a
robot or computer; champions of the technology have even speculated that one day the Internet
of Things could extend to things as small as bits of dust. Generally speaking, the "thing" is
something we want to track, measure, or monitor. It could be your own body, a pet, an elderly
relative, a home, an office block, or pretty much anything else you can imagine.

2. The identifier

If we want to be able to connect things, monitor them, or measure them, we need to be

able to identify them and tell them apart. It's easy enough with people: we all have names, faces,
and other unique identifiers. It's also relatively easy with products we buy from stores. Since the
1970s, most of them carried have unique numbers called Universal Product Codes (UPC),
printed on their packs using black-and-white zebra patterns—barcodes, in other words. The
trouble with barcodes is that someone has to scan them and they can "store" only a very small
amount of information (just a few digits). A better technology, RFID, allows objects to identify
themselves to a network automatically using radio waves, with little or no human intervention. It
can also transmit much more information.

3. The sensors

If an object simply identifies itself to a network, that doesn't necessarily tell us very
much, other than where it is at a certain time. If the object has built-in sensors, we can collect
much more useful information. So automatic sensors that can routinely transmit automatic
measurements are another key part of the Internet of Things. Any type of sensor could be wired
up this way, from electronic thermometers and thermocouples to strain gauges and reed switches.

4. The network

It makes sense for things to exist and communicate on a network the same way that
computers exist and talk to one another over the Internet—using a standard agreed
communication method called the Internet Protocol (IP). IP is based on the idea that everything
has a unique address (an IP address) and exchanges data in little bits called packets. If things
communicate using IP, or use something like WiFi to talk to an Internet-connected router, it
opens up the possibility of controlling them from a Web browser anywhere in the world. That's
why we're now seeing home security and monitoring systems that allow you to do things like
turning your central heating on and off with smartphone apps.

5: The data analyzer

Once we're collecting masses of data, from hundreds, thousands, millions, or even
billions of things, analyzing it could find patterns that help us work, move, and live much more
smartly—at least in theory. Data mining the information we gather from people or car
movements and optimizing our transportation systems could help us reduce travel times or
congestion, for example, with major benefits for people's quality of life and the
environment. Cloud computing systems (the idea of using powerful computer services supplied
over the Internet) are likely to play a very big part in the Internet of Things, not least because the
amount of data collected from so many things, so regularly, is likely to be enormous.

Who's using it already?

You don't have to look too far to see the Internet of Things in action. Libraries were early
adopters, embedding RFID chips in book covers so that people could borrow and return items
themselves using self-checkout machines. That gave instant stock-control, better security, and (in
theory) the possibility of freeing up librarians to spend more time helping people (in practice,
many libraries simply have fewer staff now). Tracking your home-delivery purchases over the
Internet is another very basic example: if every parcel is barcoded and scanned at every point of
its journey from warehouse to customer, with the scanners all wired to a central database, it's
easy to work out where anything is at any time.
 Much more interesting examples are also starting to emerge. Hive, a home-heating
system launched by British Gas, uses a wireless thermostat that communicates with your home
Internet router—making it possible to adjust your heating or hot water using a smartphone app or
web browser; the Nest Learning Thermostat, a rival home thermostat system, is more
sophisticated but can be controlled by an app in a similar way. Piper, a home management and
security system, goes even further: it connects a whole raft of sensors and alarms to a web
interface so people can monitor and manage their homes when they're at work or on vacation.

Even the infamous Internet fridge is starting to arrive—albeit in rather slow motion.
Between 2014 and 2019, Amazon tested a system called Dash, featuring a handheld scanner that
you could swipe over products to reorder things when supplies got low. A related idea was to
stick simple Internet-connected "Dash buttons" around your home that you could use to reorder
things with a single click.

In one way or another, all the big digital technology companies are exploring variations
on the Internet of Things. Apple has HomeKit (which turns iPods and iPhones into smart home
controllers) and HealthKit (which lets you monitor your health and fitness and, if you wish, share
the data with your doctor or hospital through a smartphone app). Google has Home and Fit,
which lets people monitor and analyze exercise data collected from wearable sensors and
trackers developed by a whole collection of partner companies. Samsung, leading maker of both
smartphones and home appliances, sees a great opportunity in linking the two in a system called
the SmartThings Hub. Microsoft is also believed to be working on smart home systems linked to
its Kinect motion tracker and Xbox gaming system. And Amazon has Alexa.

Good points and bad points

Think of this scenario.

It's yet again another day, your alarm rings at 6:30am. You have to get ready for school.
The moment you switch off the alarm, your coffee maker started to brew your coffee. The heater
in your bathroom adjusted to your preferred temperature.

After having your breakfast, you returned the milk container inside the fridge. The fridge
identified that you are running out of milk, so it contacted the supermarket and ordered the
quantity you need. A message was also sent to your phone as a notification. Your refrigerator can
also read tags and can alert you when the food is about to reach their expiry date.

On your way home after a tiring day, you opened your phone and used an application to
switch on the lights and the air-conditioning unit at home. The television is already on your
favorite channel. Your home is literally just waiting for you to come home, ready to welcome
you as you open your door.

Advantages
 1. Easier Communication

Through the help of the physical devices that are connected with one another,
communication has become easier and hence the total transparency has become available.
It is almost an advantage of the internet in general. We are all aware that the internet
really made it so much easier for us to communicate even to people who are thousand
miles away from us.

2. Faster and timely output brought by large amount of automation and control
3. Access to more information

How? Because everything is connected, with just one or few clicks, you’ll know
the information you need. Most of the time, it will actually be provided to you. There’s a
quote saying, “Knowledge is power. But knowledge is not power if you’re not going to
apply it.” Of course, the more we know, the better, because it will help us in our
decision-making.

4. Easier and more efficient monitoring of things

The Internet of Things allows us to monitor everything around us easily. Fpr

example, monitoring the quantity of supplies we have left at home or in the office, the air
quality at home which can indicate whether or not it is too polluted and unsafe, and the
expiration date of products that will tell if it is still good for consumption. Overall, it will
allow us to save money, time and effort.

5. Improved quality of life

Basically, both the technology and the internet aim to give us a more convenient
life or an improved quality of life. The internet of things gives that same benefit.

Disadvantages

1. Compatibility is not guaranteed for the products offered by different manufacturing

companies.

The Internet of Things results to some disadvantages because it is too promising.

Companies who offer appliances and other technological devices would want to
manufacture smart technologies. Because of the existence of different competing
companies, would that mean we will be needing to have one controller for each brand of
appliance or technological device that we have at home? If yes, that would be very
expensive. If that will be the case, the advantage that states that it will allow us to save
money will be defeated.

2. Complexity and more opportunities of failure.

3. Increased risk of losing privacy.
 With all of this IoT data being transmitted, the risk of losing privacy increases.
For instance, how well encrypted will the data be kept and transmitted with. Just a while
ago, we mentioned of the advantage of an easier access to information. Contrary to that,
are we okay with the possibility of allowing other people to know private things about
us?

4. Possibility of hacking which might affect one’s safety.

It can greatly affect our safety in terms of health, and it will allow other people to
access to your private and confidential information.

5. Can lead to unemployment issues in the society.

This is applicable to those who are less educated or less-skilled. Automation of

things will result to them losing their jobs. Thus, it will add up to the unemployment rate
in the economy.

6. Too much dependence on the internet.

- “Anything that is too much is bad.” If we are too dependent, instead of us controlling
technology, technology will be the one that will control us. It will also make the future
generation (or even today’s generation) addicted to technology and will make it hard for
them to survive their daily lives with absence of it.

References

Quek, T. (2017, February 14). The Advantages and Disadvantages of the Internet of Things.
Retrieved from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/advantages-disadvantages-internet-things-iot-
tommy-quek

Explain that Stuff. (2019). Smart homes and the Internet of Things. Retrieved from
https://www.explainthatstuff.com/smart-home-
automation.html?fbclid=IwAR2GdYfGyWmzyvwLebwYO0f-
WLqYXAtr_aVXfs09Kv7B4oAFXt3foDU_jyw