What Stage Is Smart Home in? What Are the Industry Challenges
Nowadays, with the rapid development of science, technology and economy, the Internet of things has gradually affected all walks of life and began to be closely related to our life. Among them, smart home has become a key application field of the Internet of things in the home environment.
From smart door locks to smart speakers to floor sweeping robots, smart items are constantly emerging in home life; Huawei launched AllInOne whole house intelligent solution, Haier successively landed three winged bird experience stores in Beijing and Qingdao, and Meizu also recently released a series of new smart home products... In an instant, traditional home appliance manufacturers, Internet giants, mobile phone manufacturers and network operators scrambled for the entrance of smart home, and whole house intelligent became the outlet of the industry, The smart home track has become hot again.
While smart home improves our quality of life, there are also many problems. Anyone who can even a WiFi, dare to pat his chest and call himself "smart home"; When I bought brand a products, I found that it is still difficult to be compatible with brand B products; Obviously, it's just a surveillance camera, but it may become a "spy" at home.
The development of smart home seems to have a long way to go, but the development of the industry always has traces to follow and keeps moving forward. What stage is smart home in? What are the industry challenges? What are the characteristics of players? Where is the future going? Next, let's talk about it.
Part. 1 current development stage of smart home
In 1984, United technologies applied the concept of building equipment informatization and integration to the urban construction of Hartford, Connecticut. The concept of "intelligent building" appeared, and the concept of "smart home" was born.
By the end of the last century, people had a complete concept of the expected intelligent life: intelligent identification access control, intelligent lighting, creation and sound control. When the food ran out, they only need to scan the bar code, and the computer will automatically put the goods into the shopping cart
In 1999, Microsoft's slogan "Microsoft smart home" showed people's imagination of intelligent life at that time. Smart home really began to land, but also until 2014, Google acquired nestlabs.
In the following years, smart home began to be hot, developing from concept stage to 1.0 smart single product stage. At the stage of intelligent single product, the industry focuses on the intelligent upgrading of subdivided categories, mainly focusing on products. However, each single product presents the characteristics of isolation and dispersion, non prominent functions and poor use experience.
With the improvement of the intelligence of individual products, the enrichment of SKUs and the interworking of different communication protocols, a full set of smart home solutions centered on scenarios are emerging, and the industry has gradually entered the stage of 2.0 intelligent interconnection. Today, the development of smart home is in the stage of 2.0 smart interconnection.
In the intelligent interconnection stage, taking the scene as the center, the Internet of things technology is applied to realize the interconnection between intelligent devices, and the state is changed synchronously according to different scenes, so as to maintain the coordination between home devices and residential environment, and build the whole house intelligent through combination.
At present, at this stage, in addition to innovative home appliance enterprises, the main participants in the industry also include intelligent hardware manufacturers, Internet companies and communication operators. Various giants have entered the layout of smart home, and the market competition has intensified.
According to industry forecasts, with the help of big data, artificial intelligence, machine learning and other technologies, the next stage of smart home in the future will be the 3.0 active intelligence stage. This stage will focus on users and provide punctual, personalized and intelligent services around people's needs by establishing the basis of personal data analysis, behavior habit understanding and independent in-depth learning.
Part. 2 what are the current industry challenges of smart home
At present, smart home is in the early stage of industrial development. Smart home enterprises pay more attention to the market share and core leadership of smart products, and more implement their own technical standards, resulting in poor product compatibility and lack of standards for data sharing and interconnection. This is the primary issue.
Among the wireless communication technologies on the market, WiFi, Bluetooth and ZigBee are most widely used in the industry. Wireless communication technology is suitable for different smart home products according to its advantages and disadvantages, and helps to realize interconnection between devices, but the problem of non-uniform communication protocols still exists.
The general solution in the industry is often to solve the problem of interconnection between devices through transit devices such as gateways and cloud platforms. However, if standards are to be unified, manufacturers in the industry need to reach open cooperation.
Fortunately, Xiaomi, Huawei, Haier and other enterprises have established the open Zhilian Alliance (OLA) in early December, which may be answered soon.
Secondly, security issues. Security problems mainly come from: first, enterprises collect user data without authorization and hand over or sell the data to other enterprises; Second, hackers can attack or access users' private data by illegal means.
Security is not a unique problem of smart home, which is a common problem of the whole Internet of things industry. With a large number of IOT terminal devices integrated into the network, security issues will be paid more and more attention.
The safety of smart home is a systematic problem, which needs the coordination of technology, management and laws and regulations to ensure the healthy development of the whole industry.
At present, with the development of smart home, there are not enough effective laws and regulations to ensure the safety of smart home devices. In addition to reminding consumers to timely modify the default password, disable some unused functions and other basic operations, there is no better way.
Finally, the smart home is not smart enough. Many enterprises follow the trend and enter the smart home market. The so-called smart home products are far from the real "smart" standard, but they still produce, publicize and sell under the banner of "smart".
The functional design of some smart homes is not perfect, and the user experience effect is poor. When many smart home devices are operated, the steps are extremely complex, and most users will feel obscure and difficult to understand. The actual experience is even worse. When consumers experience the interaction of intelligent hardware links, they are more like "one hammer deal".
However, we know that the improvement of smart home is inseparable from the rapid development of science and technology. The four key technologies of Internet of things, cloud computing, edge computing and artificial intelligence are driving the rapid development of smart home industry.
5g will make the Internet of things applications more mature and keep intelligent single products online in real time. Cloud computing stores and processes a large amount of information, edge computing makes feedback more timely, terminal artificial intelligence makes services more intimate, and short-range wireless communication technology makes the system more extended. The "smart unwise" disease of smart home is gradually improving.
Part. 3 player characteristics of smart home industry
China's smart home industry can be divided into aftermarket model and front market model. Simply, the application layer players can also be divided into front mounted players and back mounted players.
Smart home front decoration refers to providing users with a complete set of smart home solutions before decoration. The participants in the front decoration market include real estate developers, home decoration companies and whole house intelligent solution providers. The products mainly installed in the front decoration scheme include smart cameras, smart routers, smart gateways, smart lights, smart access control, etc.
Due to the characteristics of time-consuming and labor-consuming, high one-time investment cost and high installation threshold, the front loading market will enter the vision of consumers later than the rear loading market.
However, because the front smart home service is more stable and the connection is more efficient, the complete set of solutions can obtain more comprehensive user data information and improve the user experience, which is favored by players in the industry.
Smart home afterdecoration, in short, is that after completing the decoration of the whole house, users do not need to change the wiring and water and electricity layout. By purchasing smart home products and using wireless connection, they can realize the interconnection of products and the intelligence of home. Xiaomi is such a player.
The back loading has the characteristics of simplicity, convenience and low cost, which is easier to be accepted by consumers. However, the rear loading is more inclined to DIY with multiple intelligent single products, which is less integrated and systematic.
With the gradual opening of the market for smart home items, the improvement of consumer acceptance and recognition, the completion of user education, and the front loading mode may be more liked by users. Now the rise of whole house intelligence may be the best example.
Part. 4 Summary: development trend of smart home
(1) The front loading market is gradually heating up, and the whole house intelligence has attracted much attention
At present, real estate has changed from incremental market to stock market. Since 2019, China's real estate industry has developed from extensive expansion to fine operation. The front mounted smart home market has become a new incremental market that real estate developers need to activate. In the process of the popularization of smart home in the future, the front decoration market will play an important role.
In addition to the help of smart real estate, the improvement of per capita consumption level also urges users to pay more attention to the quality of home life. Compared with the rear loading mode, the front loading mode with higher systematicness can help users design their own home environment from 0 to 1. Under the condition of favorable cost, it will be more popular. Secondly, many players compete to enter the whole house intelligent industry, which will also lead to a new round of technology and mode evolution of the industry.
(2) Senseless and active intelligence is the ivory tower of smart home
With the maturity of artificial intelligence technology, smart home will finally realize no influence and initiative, that is, automatically realize scene analysis, activity state analysis and failure rate analysis, automatically make reasonable response, record and save relevant operation habits, and complete the transformation of smart home from "intelligence" to "wisdom" and from passive to active.
The universal application of voice interaction, video recognition and other technologies will also generalize the entrance of smart home, not just in smart phones, smart speakers and other hardware. In the future, perhaps the hardware in each smart home scenario will have interaction and be able to "smart" like people to provide services for our home life.
