Apple announced HomeKit, a new framework to make your house smarter by integrating it with the iPhone and iPad, as part of the upcoming iOS 8 upgrade announced at its Worldwide Developers Conference on June 2. This initiative could not have come at a better time given the increasing complexity of home automation and the “smart home” that span applications, devices, wireless standards, and a multitude of communication protocols. Imagine two different apps to turn on the lights in the home because the equipment came from two different vendors. Imagine yet another app for the doors in the house, and another app to control the plugs and switches.
This complexity goes beyond applications to issues of fundamental connectivity. For the smartphone to be the remote control for the home, devices must use either Bluetooth LE or Wi-Fi. This is fine until one considers how poorly Bluetooth works when paired to multiple devices at once. Wi-Fi has its own challenges, with higher power requirements making it unsuitable for devices and sensors that live off of batteries.
While the Apple HomeKit may not solve all of these problems, the addition of this heavyweight throwing its resources behind the IoT movement in the home is a great boon for the nascent market. HomeKit is expected to deliver secure pairing and the ability to easily control individual or groups of devices throughout the house–including integration with Siri – Apple’s voice recognition service. This allows users to give commands like, “Siri, turn on the lights in the living room.” The introductory partners include some big names, including Philips, Texas Instruments, Sylvania, Haier, Schlage and more. That means your iPhone will soon be able to communicate with locks, lights, cameras, doors, thermostats, plugs and switches through a secure environment.
While this announcement is great for the consumer, it is also significant for the enterprise. Smartphones and tablets that began life as consumer devices now comprise the majority of network-connected equipment in any business or office environment. So consider the profound impact IoT will have on the work place, a market that is predicted to be even bigger than these devices combined. IDC predicts that 212 billion devices will be connected to the Internet by 2020. Imagine a workplace where the ID badge disappears, replaced by biometrics sensors, or where proximity sensors know when you are coming and greet you upon entering the workplace. Imagine too an office or cube that knows when you are there and turns on the lights, unlocks doors, and logs you into your workstation — all automatically.
There is still a lot of work that needs to happen before this workplace Minority Report nirvana, or big brother Orwellian 1984 hell, depending on your point of view, come to fruition. IoT protocols are still a work in progress. MQTT, CoAP, XMPP, AMQP, 6LoWPAN, and uIP is just a small list of often conflicting protocols related to this space. But with all the tech leaders in the consumer space now in the ring, wide spread adoption of IoT won’t be far away from impacting us in the home as well as the workplace.
