Smart Home Devices Need to Get a Lot Smarter

Imagine a dishwasher that requires a username and password. Smart homes will require unprecedented effort to ensure not just security but also usability.

The battle between Google and Apple is moving from smart phones to smart things, with both companies vying to provide the underlying architecture that networks your appliances, utilities, and entertainment equipment. Earlier in June, at its annual developer conference, Apple announced HomeKit, a new software framework for communications between home devices and Apples devices. Meanwhile, Nest, a maker of smart thermostats and smoke alarms that was bought by Google earlier this year for $3.2 billion, recently launched a similar endeavor with software that lets developers build apps for its products and those from several other companies.

Indeed, a quick look at the Works with Nest website reveals just how interconnected our future is about to become, with smart cars telling our smart thermostats when well be home, smart dryers keeping our clothes fresh and wrinkle-free until we arrive, and household lights that flash red when the Nest detector senses smoke or carbon monoxide.

In fact, though, many of us are already living amongst an Internet of (some) things. We have desktops, laptops, cell phones, streaming devices like Apple TV and Roku boxes, and even smart televisions. Its just that these systems have barely begun to work together properly, and therein lies the problem.

The visions of Google and Apple will require a lot more than new frameworks and developer conferences to be truly transformative. They will require heretofore-unseen levels of reliability, security, and usability. Otherwise were in for a frustrating and possibly dangerous networked future.

Wi-Fi is a key enabler of the networked home. But while Wi-Fi is now present in more than 61 percent of U.S. households, many homes have incomplete coverage, and when Wi-Fi doesnt work, debugging is difficult. It will need to be dramatically more reliable than today to support the networked future.

Broadband Internet will need to be more reliable as wellas reliable as electric service is today. For many this may mean cable modems that can fall back to some kind of wireless 4G service, perhaps from a different provider.These modems will need to be dramatically easier to install and maintain than todays.

We will also need improved debugging systems for when the Internet doesnt work as it should. Today the primary recourse when your Internet is down is to reboot the cable modem, the laptop, or the smart TVor even all three! And perhaps the problem wasnt even in the house. To legitimately be considered smart, smart devices must assess whats wrong with the connection, and then help fix it.

Connecting anything to a secure home Wi-Fi network is a challenge for many. And some devices need additional authentication information, such as an Apple or Google username and password. When passwords change, the smart objects need to get the new passwords, or they cease to work.

This approach of binding our smart devices to our personal accounts may be an easy engineering decision today, but it will make less sense as more devices show up in households with multiple family members. Families shouldnt be forced to decide if the dishwasher is bound to Moms Gmail account or Dads. Instead, the household should have its own identity, with different family members having different levels of access depending on their needs.

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Smart Home Devices Need to Get a Lot Smarter