My neighbor called from work recently to ask, first, if I was home and, if so, would I check to see if she’d left her curling iron plugged in. She’s a nurse who works a night shift, and the “would you check my …” call has become such a recurring theme that she long ago entrusted me with a key to her home. No problem. It’s what neighbors do – right? – and it usually works, but when she made that last call, I was out of town, and she had no backup plan.
So, when I returned, I drove her to a big-box store and helped her select a WiFi-enabled wall-plug switch that would allow her to monitor the status of any appliance she plugged into it – including her curling iron – via her smartphone and to turn it off if she’d inadvertently left it on. She: (1) was impressed with my knowledge of such things (I’d helped her set up a wireless router some time ago, so, yeah, she considers me a tech genius), and (2) was so entertained by communicating with the little smart wall-plug switch using her smartphone that she began to wonder, out loud, what else in her home she might automate and connect to via the Cloud.
There was her coffee maker and iron, of course, and then her thermostat, and when I reminded her that she sometimes calls asking if I’d check to see if she’d locked her door, we explored options for a “smart lock.” Before long, the list of away-from-home worries she wanted to tackle with smart technology exceeded ten. Problem was, no single consumer home-automation source made a smart wall-plug switch and a smart thermostat and smart lockset – at least, none that we could find. Within a single day of home-automation brainstorming, we were confronted with the “basket of remotes” problem that currently plagues the home-automation industry.
Consumer demand for the levels of IoT deployment that are already so well established in industrial and commercial applications has outpaced the home-automation industry’s current offerings. For my neighbor and millions of others like her, the result is a hodge-podge of ad hoc solutions managed through fragmented systems, needlessly complicating already-busy lives.
Of course, I didn’t invent the “basket of remotes” analogy, nor am I even sure who did. I got the phrase from an article by Jean-Louis Gassée published in the Monday Note tech blog and appropriately entitled Internet of Things: The “Basket of Remotes” Problem. Gassée’s article struck a chord, reflecting my frustration when I, her next-door “tech genius,” couldn’t guide my neighbor to a fully integrated, single-app solution to her growing home-automation ambitions.
In contrast, I’m relieved that, premier partners like Advantech, I need never be at a loss for seamlessly integrated, comprehensive solutions to industrial- and commercial-scale IoT challenges. You’ll find a library of informative videos, tech notes, case studies and white papers through Advantech’s Internet of Things, Actualizing an Intelligent City page so you too need never be at a loss for solutions to industrial and commercial IoT challenges.