Chapter 12

The Future of The Home

Erwin Six

Jan Bouwen

The essential vision

Homes are unique. They define the occupants, their preferences and lifestyles. In addition to the purely functional aspects, homes also provide the boundary and interface to the rest of the world. They contain personal possessions, memories and familial relationships and they provide security and privacy for everything contained within them.

We are at a turning point in the history of homes. The coming proliferation of connected home devices driven by the Internet of Things (IoT), the increased intelligence of these devices and the advent of an increasing number of robotic devices and electronic assistants have the potential to change our home lives. But, only those technologies that meet a defining human need and augment and automate our existence will be adopted.

The IoT and augmented intelligence systems will create a third wave of home automation, following the information automation of the 1990s and the electromechanical automation of the 1950s that preceded it. Connected smart home objects will create more time by taking over the mundane and operational aspects of our lives, leveraging intelligence agents running in edge clouds. This will allow homes to become virtualized so they can be carried with us wherever we go. In essence, the home will become nomadic to match our increasingly nomadic digital existence.

This new home era will be defined by:

• The ultra-sensory home: Devices will have an improved ability to see, listen, talk, and move in natural ways, effectively transforming every home network into the central nervous system of our personal digital lives.
• The simple secure home: The configuration and management of the future home will be as simple and secure as the current physical and mechanical home.
• The nomadic home: A new virtual Home (vHome) environment will create a cyber-counterpart of our physical home that can be instantiated anywhere, with connectivity that replicates the physical space, programmable partitions between our personal and professional existence, and the ability to invite people into our vHomes.
• New lifestyle services: Instead of services built on islands of automation, such as home lighting, security, health monitoring applications and smart meters, lifestyle services will emerge that will take over more complex cognitive tasks to sense and adapt the home environment automatically to our needs.

This chapter outlines the major trends and the associated technologies that will have an impact on the future home, as well as the societal impact that will be enabled by an era of global digital nomadicity.

The past and the present

After three decades of information-centric technology innovation in the home, the emerging IoT era promises to transform daily home life, continuing the transformation started by the electromechanical automation era in the 1950s.

The electromechanical home automation era

The history of labor-saving home innovations goes back millennia. But in the 1950s, the desire to accelerate and automate tasks led to widespread adoption of electromechanical automation. Power tools, such as drills and saws, and electromechanical machines, such as pumps, alleviated physical effort and accelerated the completion of household tasks. But, these innovations required manual operation and scheduling. Similarly, electromechanical appliances and devices, such as vacuum cleaners, washing machines and refrigerators, liberated people from many manual tasks. However, these innovations still depended on human intervention and cognition to move, guide and load/empty the device, as well as to determine when and where to perform the task. The introduction of the microwave oven in the 1960s and 1970s was the last significant innovation of the electromechanical automation era. It reduced the time needed to cook food, although with new cognition requirements: users had to know the required settings for each food type.

In effect, the result of all these electromechanical innovations was that the time spent on the physical task was saved, but cognitive time was largely unchanged or, in some cases, increased.

The information automation era

In the 1980s, a transition from electromechanical to electronic automation took place. The VCR, CD players and game consoles were the vanguards of a new era that shifted the focus away from manual housekeeping toward enhancement and automation of information and entertainment. The VCR allowed automated video recording for later viewing at a different location. The CD allowed greater portability of audio recordings because of the smaller format and increased mechanical stability during playback. And gaming systems introduced an enhanced form of playing games that could be transported easily to another place or connected to another system. Each new capability leveraged the time saved by electromechanical automation.

The adoption of broadband Internet in the 1990s moved the home into the first digital information age (figure 1). By enabling home access to the information contained on the World Wide Web, users could search for and access digital information efficiently from home that previously required a physical excursion to a reference library or the purchase and shipping of a limited set of reference books. This allowed all information to be accessed from anywhere and achieved the goal of saving time in the quest for information.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the web evolved into a medium for commerce with the advent of online sellers, such as Amazon.com, and the emergence of online transactional services, such as banking. New online eCommerce services allowed users to save time by optimizing the search for a desired good, replacing the physical search in bricks and mortar stores, but at the expense of having to wait for the good to arrive. Online transaction services allowed users to save time and avoid the need to travel to a physical location to conduct many transactions, including financial transactions at a bank and paying bills at public utility offices. In addition, these tasks could be completed at the optimum time for the individual, rather than on a limited and fixed schedule of opening hours. And with the advent of mobile-optimized applications (apps), the optimum time was no longer location dependent, allowing users to conduct true anytime, anywhere transactions.

The information assistance era

During the pre-digital era of the previous century, the most common information assistance functions were directory assistance offered by telephony service providers, research support provided by librarians and personal support provided by administrative assistants. The goal of each of these information assistance functions was to accelerate the discovery of information (phone numbers, printed text, meeting and travel schedules) by use of an expert in these tasks.

Since the beginning of the web era, billions of web pages have been launched by millions of publishers who have created an unprecedented volume of accessible information to navigate. Discovery and selection has become an increasingly time-consuming task. This has driven the growth of new information assistance functions (figure 1), such as enhanced search capabilities (for example, using auto-complete based on browser cookies), recommendation engines based on buying behaviors, search terms and social-network data and, more recently, digital virtual assistants, such as Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, Google Now and IBM’s Watson analytics engine. But, as discussed in chapter 10 The future of information, these services respond with answers in the form of data (facts) or information (the basic connection between data), but not knowledge (the meaning of the information). Therefore, they are not fully cognitive. They do not assist in the acquisition of knowledge as a true intelligent virtual assistant would, only the acquisition of the information that can be used to glean knowledge. The acquisition of knowledge is still a human task.

But, as shown in figure 1, society is about to enter a new era — the era of life automation that follows naturally from the prior eras of electromechanical automation and information automation. In this new era, human cognition will be enhanced by new augmented intelligence functions, as described in chapter 10 The future of information, and by connected smart devices for the home that will lead to a significantly enhanced digitally-enabled and automated physical lifestyle.

Consider the present reality that will lead to this future nirvana.

It is estimated that smart homes will be less than 10% of the broadband connected homes in the US by 2020 (SNL Kagan 2014), based on current technological trends. To understand the factors that may limit the rate of adoption, it is instructive to look at the prior adoption of another transformative consumer technology: smartphones.

The smartphone’s success and the growth of smartphone sales worldwide is built on a combination of key factors (figure 2). Although devices emerged in the early 2000s, the screens were hard to read, most required a stylus for interaction and memory was too limited to allow many applications to be stored on the devices. In addition, the wireless network had insufficient coverage and capacity to support mass adoption of high-bandwidth data services. Last, there was no new “life assisting” service to drive a market disruption. However, with the combined emergence of a compelling, powerful new device (the Apple iPhone), a new service and business model that made individual pieces of digital music available legally on these devices at an attractive price (the iTunes store) and the concomitant support of a new high capacity network (3G evolving to LTE) to connect the two, the adoption rate was unprecedented.

Looking ahead to the future of the consumer home, a similar set of requirements will be needed to drive change: a new service and business model, a new set of device or technological capabilities to support the service and a new networking regime to provide the required connectivity.

The future

The era of home life automation

We are now on the threshold of this future: a new era of “life automation” where the devices in the home will cooperate to provide cognitive digital assistance. In this future, the home environment will be virtualized and users will be able to recreate it anywhere to allow this digital assistance to be available everywhere.

The future home environment will leverage pervasive sensing to monitor location, status and usage of objects throughout the home and infer behavioral patterns from the collected data. Based on this information, it will proactively identify needs and coordinate the actuation of connected devices, appliances and information services, leveraging augmented intelligence tools.

The essential home assistance functions in this new era can be broadly categorized into four sets of services:

• Infrastructure and environment management: Energy and water consumption monitoring and automation, heating and air conditioning monitoring and control, lighting control, appliance control (including automated maintenance), object tracking and locating, access control (lock controls), security camera monitoring and control, smoke/CO2/Radon detector monitoring and control
• Information and entertainment management: Digital family scheduling and calendaring (with display on any device), contextual information delivery and control (news, social updates, alerts), universal home media control, with zero-touch sharing of information/media and controls with any defined virtual group
• Housekeeping management: Automated replenishment of consumables, automated cleaning, automated pet feeding, automated garden/yard management (watering and treatment automation)
• Health management: Personalized biometric data analysis from smart wearables, motion sensors, full spectrum sensors, medication usage sensors, child/infant monitors, accident detection, with characteristic signature analysis for each resident

In essence, the life automation era will create a new service — a virtual staff — comprised of a virtual housekeeper, security and maintenance service, gardener, pet sitter, IT/networking guru and media manager, the majority of which were previously unaffordable and inaccessible for the vast majority of humankind. This virtual staff will be created as virtual instances in the edge cloud and service chained together using software-defined networking (SDN) — the new network — as described in the following and in chapter 5 The future of the cloud.

And like the future enterprise network discussed in chapter 8 The future of the enterprise LAN, in which enterprises will embrace IoT for data-driven optimization of manufacturing, logistics and business processes, the future home will leverage the new IoT era — the new devices — to optimize familial and familiar daily routines and tasks. These devices will optimize execution of the mundane and assist in the learning and execution of new human tasks.

This essential shift has three constituent technological elements:

1. A new augmented intelligence and task assistance function that uses inference, model-based control and guidance, rather than simple human intuition and trial and error
2. A device and network (r)evolution to provide the basic technological infrastructure or fabric that will enable this new realm with simplicity and security
3. A virtualization of home control that allows interaction and recreation of the home space and digital content anywhere, rather than leaving it constrained to a single physical space, together with dynamic partitioning of resources into secure access groups for work and personal functions, rather than a monolithic fixed environment

These elements are examined in detail below.

Augmented intelligence and task assistance

Humans are creatures of habit with a strong predisposition to attempt to recognize patterns from small (or no) data sets — a behavior that is essentially the origin of what is considered intuition. However, in many cases humans see correlations where no causation exists or don’t see causation where it does exist. In addition, humans are relatively poor at schedule management (too many variables to solve) and frequently in the repetition of mundane tasks, which we consider mindless (too simple to focus attention on). Consequently, a more accurate data and information-based function would be an invaluable aid to human behavioral cognition and the optimal automation of tasks.

As discussed in chapter 10 The future of information, this need will give rise to a new class of intelligent virtual assistant that uses inferred similarity and user feedback to create a complete set of intelligent, personalized and contextualized rules that can be executed by a task manager. For example, the hourly, daily or weekly movement vectors of each individual in the home could be stored and used as the basis of a set of recommended actions for home management of heating/cooling cycles, security, and the likely need for consumables, as well as knowledge of activity for each individual. The value of this type of augmented assistance is clearly the reason for the coupling of wearable devices to thermostats that is being pursued by some home and personal device makers (Bogard T. 2014).

An intriguing extension of this new reality is the possibility of having a physical task assisted by an augmented overlay of audio or video guidance or cues with the help of environmental and wearable sensors or augmented reality headsets. In essence, this is an extension of the current turn-by-turn directions provided by navigation applications to life at home. It would use inferred needs (the virtual staff function suggests a solution to a query) or a direct request for assistance. The new augmented messaging paradigm described in the chapter 9 The future of communications, could also be used to provide the controls required and communicate with the intelligent virtual assistant staff function. In addition, the media communications function of this platform will allow possible solutions to be continuously expanded by crowd-sourced and user-generated content that includes visual, audio and even sensory or tactile guidance using the appropriate set of new IoT-attached devices.

Device and network revolution

Device

Historically, the primary connected devices in a home have been the ones that were used for compute and communications purposes — personal computers, laptops, phones and tablets. However, this category of connected devices has already reached its near-saturation level of five to six devices per home as depicted in figure 3. But, the growth in broadband internet connectivity to the home and robust wireless coverage inside the home to support these devices has laid the foundation for seamless connections for a variety of other kinds of devices. Furthermore, once a home has more than one standalone device of a certain type, the synergistic value of connecting these devices will become evident, driving adoption of more connected devices in that category. This synergistic value is essentially a Metcalfe’s Law effect for home networks, with the value of the network increasing as the square of the number of connected nodes (devices). Intelligent software can create even further synergistic value by connecting, correlating and controlling devices across various categories, which will realize the vision of a truly automated smart home. Therefore, it is likely that the growth in connected devices in a home will accelerate dramatically through 2025.

The initial driver of this trend will be further growth of smart media devices — homes already have more than one on average — such as smart TVs and game consoles that provide information and entertainment services. This will be followed by smart monitoring and regulating devices, like learning thermostats and surveillance systems that provide a utility and security type of service. This category is expected to cross the two devices per home threshold in 2016. Connected healthcare devices are also a potential growth driver, taking off beginning in 2019. But even as sensor-fitted disposables and smart wearables fuel part of the growth phase from 2015 to 2020, the real driver to maturity will be the gradual but steady replacement of more and more durable home appliances (for example, washing machines, refrigerators, etc.) by their smarter new versions that make fuller home automation a reality. This will start sometime around 2018.

However, device management will become a key issue. By 2020, an average home network could be comprised of 30 to 60 connected devices, effectively resembling in scale the IT networks of current small and medium enterprises. This will require network connectivity management and the use of different air interfaces by devices with varying degrees of mobility (inside and outside the home). In addition, the security and authentication of each device must be strong and verified perpetually given the critical and personal nature of digital life automation.

Network

Meanwhile, on the network side, the plethora of new devices being added to the home, each with different power, rate (bandwidth), reach and mobility requirements, has led to the proliferation of multiple networking technologies. Today, networking options include Wi-Fi access points, Bluetooth (and beacons), proprietary wireless, Li-Fi, Ethernet, external LTE, femtocells, ZiGigEe and others. Installation of each independent network and associated devices may be relatively simple for plug-and-play technologies, but several problems arise:

• Coordinating communications devices on the same network and especially over different networks is beyond the capability of the average consumer
• Managing hardware upgrades or firmware upgrades is also complex and, for some devices, requires consumer intervention and cooperation, which will create a barrier to upgrading capabilities and coordinating services over different generations and technology combinations of home networking infrastructure
• Managing the wide area network policy for each different device type and specific application to deliver the desired quality of experience (QoE) requires an understanding of the interplay of different devices and services. This must be adjusted dynamically as communications needs change and different devices are present/absent or active/inactive on the network

The solution, which is described in more detail below, is to leverage virtualization of the home device control plane functions and SDN to create a virtual home network that is managed and run in the edge cloud. With this approach, specific per-user service chains can be created based on the capabilities and composition of each user’s home network infrastructure and the intra-home (LAN) and extra-home (WAN) communications requirements. This vHome approach also allows centralized management of service upgrades, as well as the creation of virtual instances of the home that can be accessed and controlled by any designated user from anywhere.

Simplicity and security

While this vision of future augmented and automated home management and task assistance is attractive, it has a critical dependency on the willingness of consumers to share private data with virtual assistants and associated services. This may be the biggest challenge in the realization of this vision because consumers have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with new technology. People are eager to be assisted by technology that relieves them of repetitive tasks and assists in information discovery and entertainment delivery. But, as a recent US consumer survey showed, only 20% of consumers believe that the benefits of a smart, connected home outweigh privacy concerns (figure 4). The majority of those concerns are about the data collected by connected devices and the possibility of the malicious use of the data or infection of devices by malware.

These concerns are based on fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), rather than actual experience. But the following will be required to overcome this perceptual hurdle:

• Full visibility: The standard for data privacy for vHomes should be at least as strong as that for the physical home: only those permitted to enter the home should be allowed to “see” personal media and possessions, but no-one should be able to see personal data contained within the home or on home devices without permission. So, it will be essential to design vHome connectivity and services with full and simple to understand visibility of the data being captured and stored, where it is stored, and who has access to that data. The right to have data erased for any service should be absolute.
• Home rule and overrule: A simple programmable rules interface will be needed, which will provide templates users can use to determine whom they want to have access to vHome technologies, what these users will be able to see and control and under what circumstances. For example, the information gathered from health sensors might be shareable with family members or medical professionals only when an anomalous reading has occurred with no response from the individual. A similar schema might apply to security services and emergency responders. This is common today, but it must be replicated in a virtual services space and in a way that is simple to program and control. There must be a separation of work and home control and device and content access schema. Users must also have the ability to allow physical guests in the space to connect their devices based on simple, selectable permissions that will enable interaction with existing home devices.
• Trusted vHome provider: The value of a vHome assistant that provides augmented intelligence to occupants was discussed above. When this highly personal service is combined with data privacy and security needs and support for a cloud service that allows recreation of the vHome environment in any location (discussed in more detail below), it is clear that a vHome service provider will be required to manage this service for the vast majority of people. Given the level of access and control that must be allowed in the most private of spaces, the level of trust with this service provider will be higher than that for any existing service.

The essential solution and architecture

Figure 5 illustrates the future vHome solution concept. The solution is based on the creation of virtual service instances that are instantiated in (edge) cloud infrastructure and service chained together to create the desired solution for each user, as described in chapter 5 The future of the cloud.

This vHome environment will host the software logic to manage and assist smart devices and servers in the physical home and make them accessible from anywhere. As a result, the home-state will be portable. The vHome service will manage and control separate instances for different user groups (work/office, home member/visitor). It will aggregate data for all connected home devices and allow sophisticated analysis to be performed to enable home life automation and augmented intelligent assistance.

The vHome solution will consist of a number of key technological components:

• SDN connectivity: SDN will be leveraged to create software-defined local area (SD-LAN) network connections between the home router function and the edge cloud vHome service platform (Boussard, Le Sauze, et al. 2015). It will also be used to define and enforce networking policies that determine which devices can communicate by creating service chains between the allowed elements and modifying them dynamically. Additionally, the fine-grained flow-capabilities of SDN will be used to monitor vHome service components, detect potential anomalies based on learned behavior of the constituent smart devices and provide security services, as described in chapter 3 The future of security.
• Virtualized device functions: Home devices will virtualize their software functions in a similar way as the virtualized network functions described for wide area networks in the chapters on The future of wide area networks, The future of wireless access and The future of broadband access. The physical layer technologies — displays, sensors, actuators, and basic Layer 1 functionality that interfaces with the physical world — will remain in the home. But the Layer 2 to 7 software logic will be hosted in the edge cloud to allow facile service creation and management (Marks 2015). In addition, device software upgrades to fix bugs and security flaws, as well as to add new functionality, will be simple to configure and manage.
• Private secure data services: The vHome edge cloud environment will aggregate and store the data collected by home devices, so data localization will be assured. Clear roles and access rights to data will be defined and enforced for family, visitors, work colleagues and third party services, such as healthcare, security, and virtual assistants. This will define which cloud services and devices have authorized data access and under which circumstances or contexts. The option will also exist for in-home storage where required.
• Personalized augmented intelligence: To simplify home operation and automation, intelligent virtual staff functions can be created in the edge cloud and added to service chains, as required. These assistants will be able to analyze the device data stored locally and provide cognitive support via complex data analysis on data aggregates and based on learned and known behaviors for each user and device type. In addition, new augmented overlays (for example, for audio or video assistance) can be instantiated in the edge cloud and connected to the vHome device service as needed.

These capabilities will address the critical network, device and security requirements of a vHome solution and provide the desired simplicity to support widespread adoption.

A key component of the overall vHome service offering will be the ability to define ad hoc vHome contexts or virtual spaces. These spaces will be spontaneously created by users and will consist of a subset of devices and associated cloud services for a specific use context, such as a family, work or e-health space. Users will have the ability to share virtual spaces with different people. For example, a family space can be used to share media content and devices (screens, media players, computing peripherals, etc.) based on different permissions granted for family and visitors. Likewise, a work space can be used to enable content devices to access an enterprise environment to allow remote working and collaboration via screen mirroring and sharing or a video conference service. And these spaces can be extended to include devices and cloud services owned by other participants. For example, a family space can include the smartphone of a visitor and a work space can include a family member’s corporate laptop.

As these virtual spaces are instantiated in the cloud, they will be accessible from anywhere. The dynamic networking connectivity provided by the SDN controller will push new forwarding rules to allow such connections between the vHome and the authorized user location. When two such spaces are interconnected, the controller will also ensure that gateway functions are instantiated, both to assure seamless interworking between two devices even if protocols are different and/or to monitor the behavior of the devices in both spaces.

To understand the potential of this new vHome and vSpace reality, consider a scenario with a visitor wearing a healthcare monitoring device. As the visitor enters the home, the device is detected and identified. The vHome service discovers the device capabilities and associated services. The homeowner receives a notification on a smartphone and allows the home to grant permission for the device to access the home network with a recommended policy. The service orchestrator asks the SDN network controller to install the required networking policies to allow the device to connect to the local home infrastructure and to the device’s healthcare monitoring service, as well as to any third party monitors, such as the devices of designated family members. If an event occurs, access to additional vHome functionality, such as video monitoring or conferencing using home screens and cameras, could be requested automatically by the healthcare monitoring service. If this occurs, the vHome service manages the request and alerts the homeowner to permit or deny the request for a limited time.

A myriad of other service scenarios can be imagined and will, no doubt, be created by a diverse group of home and IoT application providers. In this new reality, the trusted partner role of the vHome service provider will be absolutely vital.

The future is now

The (edge) cloud will play a critical role in the evolution of connected home devices shown in figure 3. As illustrated in figure 6, there has been an increasing reliance on cloud storage and backup of personal content and device configurations since the adoption of smartphones and tablets in 2010. In addition, with the introduction of HTML5 and web streaming technologies applications that used to run locally on devices are now moving to network-based hosted service models. For example, streaming audio services are replacing mp3 audio file downloads.

This shift is driven primarily by the desire to access more content than can be stored locally on a typical smart device, the ability to access content from any device, the interest in sampling and discovering new content without having to acquire a priori, and the recommendation engines that facilitate and automate this process.

Likewise, the personal computing market has moved toward cloud storage with services such as Google Drive, Dropbox and Microsoft’s Office 365. And increasingly, networking and video services offered by service providers are becoming virtualized. This is an attempt to shift complex security, parental control, and Wi-Fi configuration and management into the network with virtual residential gateways (vRGWs) (Alcatel-Lucent 2015), or to minimize cost and allow facile feature evolution using a combination of smart TVs and virtual set-top-boxes (vSTBs) with cloud DVR services.

The next wave of cloudification will be driven by IoT devices, which will be designed to be small, low-cost and have long battery lives to minimize the need for proximity to charging sources, as described in chapter 11 The future of the Internet of Things. As a result, IoT devices will have relatively little processing power or local storage and will require cloud assistance to provide a complete service. For example, cloud support will be needed to store the data generated and support more advanced data analysis over longer timeframes. It will also be needed to support the analysis of data from different devices, such as that collected from a variety of e-health sensors, wearables and home motion sensors that will enable an application to infer user activity level and type. And it will be needed to provide guidance via intelligent assistants that support sophisticated behavioral learning algorithms.

In addition, there will be a significant growth in cloud-assisted smart home appliances, such as washing machines and dryers, refrigerators, dishwashers and heating and cooling systems. Due to their relative cost and connection to a power source, these devices will not be as limited in processing power as IoT devices. Cloud support will allow control and management of these devices remotely (value for the end user), as well as remote diagnostics and software upgrades (value for the device manufacturer and end user). And it will enable integration of the data captured by these appliances to be part of the larger vHome automation service.

As illustrated in Figure 6, this wave of IoT device and smart appliance deployments will require the majority of edge cloud services going forward. This is because of the highly personal nature of these devices, the need for low-latency and high-performance connectivity, and the need for strong data privacy and security at the per flow level. Consequently, the realization of this ultimate new vHome paradigm will depend on the rate of deployment of edge cloud facilities by web scale, IT or network service providers. However, the first phase of the smart home reality is already upon us. Table 1 shows a sample of connected home devices available in 2015, as well as how the cloud is assisting and enhancing basic device functionality.

Summary

The future X network paradigm will extend into the home. Smart devices and augmented intelligence will bring a new wave of life automation to the home environment. This will be achieved by leveraging virtualization, SDN and the edge cloud architectural shift to enable the home to be virtualized. Ultimately, this will allow both intelligent life automation in the home and the recreation of the home anywhere. Partitioning of this vHome into virtual spaces will be enabled with different access permissions and policies. This will extend the concept of future X network slicing to be truly end-to-end. And it will enable a rich set of new services to be provided by global and local service providers.

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1 - Modeling by Bell Labs Consulting based on various data (Pyramid 2013, 2015; Infonetics 2013