Home time

Rather like the domestic android or the flying car, the all-singing, all-dancing smart-home that adjusts your heating, runs your bath and looks after things while you are away remains one of the unfulfilled technology dreams of the 21st century.

From standalone devices such as intelligent fridges to centralised controllers for heating, lighting and entertainment, plenty of companies have tried to enter the so-called home automation market; but high cost and poor levels of integration have meant that the technology has not quite lived up to its early billing.

Now Finnish mobile phone giant Nokia believes that it may have addressed these challenges and developed a solution that could finally make the networked home a reality. Expected to cost between €300 and €500 (£276 and £460), and scheduled for a European launch later this year, Nokia’s home-control centre uses a cellphone or other mobile device to communicate with a sophisticated home router that is wirelessly connected to devices around the home. The company claims that the system can be integrated with home lighting, security and heating systems, as well as, in the longer term, digital healthcare systems that could help keep patients out of hospital.

Talking to The Engineer shortly after unveiling the technology late last year, Toni Sormunen, Nokia’s smart-home director, claimed that after decades of stalled predictions the time is finally right for the smart home. He cited Nokia’s own market research and wider technology issues as the factors behind this fertile climate. ‘Broadband is widely used by our target customer segments, market penetration of mobile phones is practically 100 per cent, people are ecologically aware, have computers in their homes, and new wireless technologies such as z-wave and zigbee are available at reasonable cost so that appliances can be brought to the market.’

Sormunen believes that the Nokia system has two major advantages over competing products such as Siemens’ smart-home technology. First, making a mobile phone the user interface means that consumers will be able to control their heating or activate their security systems from either the comfort of the sofa or the other side of the world. But the real clincher as far as Nokia is concerned is the fact that any device from any manufacturer could potentially hook into the system. Thus, in much the same way that your computer will recognise and support a host of peripheral devices, when a new wirelessly enabled device is brought into the home the software is automatically updated to support its capabilities.

This openness even stretches to the mobile device used to control the system. ‘We recognise that there are people out there who are not using Nokia devices!’ said Sormunen.