Collaboration for smart homes

years

“Stories about smart homes have been around for more than three decades. In a smart home one could check remotely if everything is all right at home. Lights and heating could be controlled from outside the home. There are also possible medical applications for certain medical devices, such as a necklace that registers heart beat or blood pressure rates, and watches that tell you where your elderly parents are.

All these applications already exist in one form or another – the technology is developed. However, smart living services haven’t been implemented on a large scale. The main reason for this is that there are different standards and platforms that cause interoperability issues; for example, different standards are used in the same type of sensors, like movement or temperature sensors. These types of interoperability issues between standards and platforms have created problems in realizing the vision of a smart home. Collaboration among platform providers and service providers for using common platforms is therefore required to solve the interoperability issues in this domain.

Collaborating is not easy for the various parties. Small companies that make devices often focus on a niche market; that is, they exist because of their device and thus do not have a long-term strategy. Moreover, they are afraid that the bigger companies that create the platforms will take their benefits. One of the bottlenecks is how the revenue should be divided.

In my research, I would like to create a framework that explains the factors that influence collaboration between actors in the smart living domain. The framework should tell what factors should be considered when planning for platform collaboration.

To do so, I will study six collaborative platform development cases in the Netherlands, Finland and China. So far I have examined two case studies in Finland and China. One important factor that has emerged thus far is openness. How easy will it be for other companies to add devices or services to the platform at a later stage? I think there will be a future for smart living devices. The technology is already there, and hopefully my research will also help to facilitate collaboration in this domain.”