Evolving Needs in Iot control and Accountability

BACKGROUND: MAKING THE HOME “SMART”

The first “wired homes” [26] were built by hobbyists during the 1980s and were highly customized and almost impossible to reproduce. The ongoing trend of ubiquitous computing brought about a miniaturization of sensors and an increased energy-efficiency in wireless communication protocols and hardware. This, in turn, led to a new generation of commercially available smart home products. Low-power wireless protocols now enable these products to reach the most remote places in the home, often at some distance from power supplies, thus providing greater flexibility in the positioning of components. Some products clearly serve a single use case (e.g., IP cameras, light bulbs). Others (e.g., openHAB) adopt a platform approach. Such platforms allow the inclusion of a multitude of sensors, actuators and applications and sometimes support several protocols, thus enabling greater flexibility and interoperability. These smart home hubs can be tailored by their users according to their individual demands. The vast majority of advertised use cases, however, focus on certain key areas such as security, comfort, and energy saving [64].
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Modern smart home systems fall into two basic categories: First there are professionally-installed and managed solutions. These dominated the market in the early days and typically featured wired connections between flush-mounted sensors and actuators (e.g., using the KNX protocol). Although wired systems benefit from greater stability and high bandwidth and are well integrated into the home, such systems call for higher investment and changes in the home infrastructure both at the point of installation and subsequently when users want to change the hardware configuration.

With the development of more energy-efficient wireless communication solutions, surface-mounted Do-It- Yourself hubs and sensors have entered the market (e.g., Samsung SmartThings, Wink Hub). They offer more flexibility when installing, (re-)configuring and extending the smart home and are especially designed to be maintained directly by users. As a result, both the opportunity, but also the burden of configuring the smart home has fallen to the user.

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