New report contends that use cases, rather than products, will fulfill the promise of the smart home.
Despite undeniable excitement about the smart home, its promise remains largely unfulfilled. The connected home industry is still in search of compelling use cases to drive adoption, according to a new report from Michael Wolf at NextMarket Insights.
The report, entitled “The Mass Market Smart Home,” is sponsored by Vivint, a leading provider of smart home technology.
NextMarket Insights forecasts the combined DIY smart device home and managed smart home services market to be nearly $17.5 billion by 2019. But according to Wolf:
“Simply selling a smart home system that connects devices will capture the imagination of early adopters, but for the smart home to become as pervasive as other seminal product categories like the smart phone, consumers must see tremendous inherent value delivered by a more connected lifestyle.”
The ability of the industry to show that the smart home fulfills a set of needs across a variety of consumer segments is the most important collective challenge facing it today. Smart home vendors need to describe how the technology can make lives better through fulfilling core needs and solving difficult problems.
“Moving the smart home industry from early adopters to mass market will depend on widely popular applications of the technology, rather than the technology itself,” said Jefferson Lyman, chief marketing officer at Vivint.
The new report analyzes compelling use cases that drive home the value of what a smart home can deliver:
Aging, Retirement, Eldercare
With the retirement of the Baby Boomer generation, aging and eldercare will present one of the biggest opportunities for innovators in the smart home and Internet of Things space.
- Monitoring: The use of adaptive learning algorithms to understand living patterns combined with motion, beacons and location sensors will provide powerful new options in the Personal Emergency Response (PERS) market over the next few years.
- Telehealth: Connecting a senior citizen’s health monitoring to the smart home and to their medical practitioner allows for regular and real-time checking of health and wellness signals.
- Cost management: Technologies to monitor and reduce resource consumption will be important parts of a retiree’s financial planning strategies in coming years.
Pet Care
With $60 billion being spent on pets every year in the U.S. alone, a large market opening exists for companies connecting pets and smart home technology.
- Video monitoring: One of the most popular uses of connected cameras is to watch a pet.
- Safety: Approximately five million pets are lost and six million pets wander into the street and are killed every year. Pet owners can integrate smart home systems with GPS-based tracking devices and set up geofence boundaries to enable real-time alerts.
- Feeding: Connecting the smart home to pet feeders allows close monitoring of food consumption, as well as the ability to automate portion control.
Children and Teenagers
Nearly three out of four teenagers today have access to a smart phone, up nearly threefold from just three years ago. This generation of digital natives creates fertile ground for the adoption of smart home technology so families can stay better connected and simplify their busy lives.
- Communication: Smart home systems can notify family members of each other’s movements by integrating with social networks and SMS.
- Safety: Many smart home systems today offer low-cost presence sensors, simple fob-devices that can be tossed into a child’s backpack to let parents know when their child comes home from school.
- Special needs: Nearly 22 percent of households with one or more children have a child with special healthcare needs. Almost half of all children with autism will run away at least once before they turn 17 years old. Smart home and security monitoring can be tailored for families of children with autism to reduce wandering and “eloping” incidents.
Download the full NextMarket report, “The Mass Market Smart Home: Examining Use Cases to Drive Smart Home Adoption”.
