What does the future of the smart home look like?

As PC and mobile markets have matured, Cheema believes that IoT will be one of the main growth drivers for semiconductors in the next decade, and smart home is one of the fastest growing segments in IoT.

A smart home is a context-aware home. Imagine you are driving home from work. When you are ten minutes away from home, your car GPS detects your location and sends a signal to your smart watch, which communicates with the home thermostat about your body temperature, and your home air conditioners are turned on to adjust the temperature for maximising your comfort. Everything happens in the background as your home understands your needs and makes intelligent decisions accordingly.

This kind of ‘smartness’ does not come from point devices e.g. speakers. This intelligence requires several end node devices to gather context data. Cheema believes this will be the year of explosive growth of end node devices. Dialog is already seeing the increased demand for smart door locks, doorbells, thermostats, and lighting. Cheema said he thinks that this trend will continue in 2021 and beyond.

Another trend Dialog are seeing in the smart home space is the implementation of BLE. Cheema explained: “One of the only reasons that the smart home concept is viable at all is because BLE offers a wireless communications standard that is low in cost and power. In fact, BLE has proven itself as the ideal option for both transmitting short bursts of data and as the standard for networking smart devices together. Moreover, BLE’s scalability ensures that as smart homes continue to become a reality, Bluetooth will be able to keep up.”

The onset of COVID-19 accelerated the adoption of the smart home. Due to the pandemic, people are spending most of their time at home. Trends such as working from home, education from home, shopping from home, and healthcare from home, are driving the consumer adoption of technologies such as remote monitoring, video conferencing, vital signs monitoring and more. While COVID-19 has significantly reduced consumer spending on travel and hospitality, the savings from unspent holiday money is going into home improvement projects, making homes smarter and more comfortable