The Hub of the Smart Home

The future of the integrated smart home

For the past year I've been working on an IoT product for the home, a mattress cover called Luna that makes your bed “smart”. It helps improve your sleep and makes things happen in a smart home when you go to bed or wake up in the morning.

Luna launched last week on Indiegogo and what started one year ago as a crazy idea is now a real product going into mass production this summer. The launch was well received by the press and a lot of journalists reached out and wanted to know the story behind the product and the technical choices we decided to take when building it. The question journalists ask the most is if I see Luna eventually becoming the central hub of the home. My answer always surprises them: I don’t believe there will ever be a central hub of the smart home, at least not a physical hub.

Wireless Technologies

I also don’t think the communication technology standard will be very different from what already exists today. The home automation industry has been around for a while and over time many wireless standards have been developed. All the successful smart home products are adopting one of the two standards that matter: Wi-Fi or BLE (Bluetooth low energy). If a product has to be online all the time because it needs to be remotely controlled, it generally uses Wi-Fi. If it is battery powered and needs to be connected only when somebody is close to it, it uses Bluetooth and syncs data through your phone. The reason for this is that there is a wi-fi router connected to the internet in almost every home and the best possible universal interface for these products is your phone and it already supports these two technologies. This means the only true hardware product that will be the hub of the connected movement is your smart phone.

Third Party Services and API Standards

APIs also play a very important role in this connected home movement. The http rest is already the standard, is adopted by every single product and it’s easily connects to every platform. But I don’t believe there will be a standard interface, not even for products in the same category.

If you take as an example the simplest product to control, the light bulb, it seems logical to believe that there will eventually be such a standard that allows a third party product to turn on any light bulb built from any brand. What’s really happening is that every company building a new connected light bulb, will add valuable features to differentiate from the other brands and will do slightly different things. As a result it’s really hard for a standard to emerge where even devices in the same product category, doing the same exact task, have very different features.

Given this lack of standards, new products can only integrate directly with a limited set of other products and we will typically have to rely on third parties to make everything work together.

These third party services will be the real central hub of the home and their main interface will be mobile apps. The core mission for such services is to connect all these devices to make them work together and to make it simple for users to customize their interaction. The main assets that these third party services have, versus standard connected hardware, is their user experience, the compatibility with as many (potentially all) connected devices as possible and more than anything else, your personal preferences about how your home devices should work together for you. IFTTT is the first popular service that is filling this gap and I believe there will be many others in the near future, as soon as smart devices became more mainstream.The same way that services like Facebook or LinkedIn have become central hubs of your identity online and hold in a centralized way your personal information for other websites to use, this new breed of integration services will hold your personal preferences of how your smart devices in your home should interact with each other. We've got a few more years before this central hub becomes mainstream reality but I’m excited to be a part of the movement.