Home Automation: Engineering A Home With Eyes, Ears And Plenty Of Smarts

This article looks at how leading-edge innovation and electronic component technologies are supporting advanced smart home security and monitoring solutions.

- Paul Golata

My third daughter recently graduated from college with an art degree. I have had the opportunity to see her artwork displayed in areas made to resemble a museum. Besides the artwork on the wall, museums always make me think of security. If you are a fan of heist movies, you know that the plot always requires that the thieves employ ingenious efforts to get in and snatch the priceless treasure. They must manoeuvre through all sorts of security arrangements—laser beams, motion detectors, pressure sensors, and the like. How awesome it would be if our homes had the same technical advantages?

Home automation has evolved into the ‘connected home’—a broad system of home electronics that has so much intelligence it can quickly repay owners for the upfront investment costs through savings stemming from efficiency, all within a relatively short period of time. The connected home promises to bring further automation into the home, linking together disparate technologies, appliances and devices, to coordinate them into a synergistic platform that serves home owners, all within the control of their fingertips. As a simple and fully integrated system, home automation offers home occupants’ peace of mind, which in today’s chaotic and turbulent world is of enormous economic value.

One aspect of home automation that ensures peace of mind involves home security and monitoring systems. This article looks at how leading-edge innovation and electronic component technologies are supporting advanced smart home security and monitoring solutions. These advances stem from new developments in electronics, technology, and design areas involving power, sensing, compute and control, as well as communications. Home automation is remaking the home environment—making it safer and more convenient (Figure 1).

Security and monitoring