The growth of connected devices for household use is rapidly growing around the world. More and more people are considering purchasing a smart appliance in the near future for example, and prices for these kinds of devices are becoming more and more affordable. Still, the growth we are seeing is not as high as expected.

 

According to a research done by the “Osservatorio IOT” of Politecnico of Milan, one of the main obstacles for the adoption of these new appliances is the lack of understanding about the benefits that consumers perceive they can get out of these devices. For sure remote monitoring of products from an App is very appreciated (from remote diagnostic to checking how long before the roast is cooked), people like to have control on what happens in the home and being able to do it while doing something else is an added value since it facilitates the ‘multitasking’ routines many people have by necessity. On the other side, being able to send commands from the App to an appliance is not necessarily perceived as a great value by all consumers, since manual interaction with the appliance is anyway required, for example to load garments in a washer or insert food in a oven, so programming and starting a cycle can be easily be done from the control panel of the product. Of course there are many more functionalities offered by manufacturers for their connected appliances but they are very often ignored or not understood by the end consumers before they purchase and install it.

 

What could raise the interest of consumers? What functionalities connected products must have to grow in the minds of consumers as necessary devices?

To answer those questions, we need to look at what are the expectations the majority of consumers have related to smart devices and appliances in particular.

 

Being able to save resources, especially energy, is for sure top of mind when people talk about expected benefits of connected appliances. This is important both because of the money saving associated with it but also because it is associated to a more environmental friendly behaviour. For “Prosumers”, being able to use the energy they produce is equally important.

 

The other insight we have from consumers is that they would love to have their products at home being part of an Ecosystem, where the sharing of information among

the different elements of the Ecosystem itself can create value adding services they can benefit from. Some examples: smoke detectors that can activate the hood to extract fumes while they ring the alarm or anti-intrusion window sensors that turn off the air conditioner if the window is open not to waste energy. These are simple things that do not require consumer intervention once set, that can run automatically and just provide additional functionalities beyond what is expected by the individual products.

 

What do these two insights have in common? The answer is that both require that the products have to be somehow able to communicate with a centralized control, taking care of energy management, the interaction between devices or both. A centralized energy manager for the entire home can help managing energy consumption by taking advantage of utilities’ offers (dynamic tariffs, incentives for peak shaving or load shifting, etc.) thus achieving savings on the energy bill for the users. But for this energy manager to optimize results, it needs to be able to exchange the same information and be able to execute the same commands across all the main electrical products in the home. Considering the fact that no consumer has every electrical product from the same brand at home, not even appliances, interoperability among electrical devices is the key. Same reasoning can be applied to the other cases mentioned, where even more different devices should be able to exchange information.

 

The possibility to create an environment at home where different products can be connected to help saving on energy and add functionality, with little or zero effort from the consumer, could likely overcome the perceived lack of benefits that many consumers still have about connected appliances or devices in general. This is why interoperability among different products of different brands is important and why in the INTERCONNECT project, several device manufacturers, even from competing companies, are working in a pre-competitive environment to find a solution to enable ecosystems like the ones described above.