Innovations: Nothing is impossible

“The aim of a smart home is for everything in the house to be fully automated,” says Sven Öhrke from the VDE Institute. And at the top of the wish list are applications that serve two basic needs in connection with a home, which are security and savings.

For the first of these, the market already offers a great deal: connected cameras and alarm systems monitor the house and property and notify the relevant people in the event of suspicious activity. Intelligent access systems work with biometric technologies such as fingerprint or facial recognition.

And for the second aspect, a lot is happening right now. The key here is energy efficiency. “This is an important issue, especially at a time when energy prices are going through the roof,” says Öhrke. Because saving electricity automatically saves money. Smart technology can help here. In an automated building, for example, the temperature in a room is lowered when there are no people there any longer – based on a predefined schedule. According to estimates by the consumer advice center, automatically lowering the temperature when you are away and heating it up again before you return home can save two to eight percent on heating costs – depending on your previous behavior.

But there are even more possibilities: digital thermostats on the radiators can communicate with a sensor on the window. If you then open the window, the room temperature is automatically lowered. Or the smart home automatically lowers shutters to provide shade when a certain level of sunlight is detected.

Technology manages energy use in the home and garage

In fact, the technology can do even more, including taking over the entire energy management of a house, says Öhrke. For example, it is possible to centrally control when certain appliances draw their power from the grid, in order to make energy use as efficient as possible.

This has an impact that extends as far as the garage, as it also includes the area of electromobility. Schneider Electric, for example, has integrated a wallbox into its Wiser smart home system. An app gives users an overview of the charging station’s energy consumption and allows them to control the charging processes via a schedule. The system can also be equipped with a so-called peak controller, which controls the power consumption of the home. Depending on the available capacity, the peak load controller adjusts the power the wallbox supplies to the vehicle and interrupts the charging process as soon as the maximum power of the house connection is exceeded.

However, the smart home is becoming truly smart with the help of artificial intelligence (AI). Thanks to AI, instead of simply following previously defined rules, the technology thinks for itself. An example of this is provided by the digital thermostats from the Hamburg-based supplier Vilisto. They are fitted with three sensors that register sound, light and movement. This allows the system to detect whether people are present in a room or not and so whether heat is required. To do this, the data from the thermostats is encrypted and transferred to Vilisto’s online platform. There, an AI then processes the information and ensures optimal heating of the rooms. The system needs two weeks to be trained. The intelligent algorithms then take care of setting the thermostats. However, the system is constantly learning and registers changes in usage behavior, for example – which in turn results in an adjustment of the heating times.

The Swiss start-up Viboo even wants to make heating control predictive with the help of AI. It offers a service that uses self-learning algorithms to predict the heating requirements of individual rooms and regulates the radiators accordingly. The calculation is based on weather forecasts and the thermal properties of the building. The occupancy of the rooms is also included in the calculation. “Currently, the facility management enters the heating plans directly,” explains Felix Bünning, co-founder and CEO of Viboo. However, there will soon be a new function that automatically detects occupancy by analyzing the humidity.

Both Vilisto and Viboo are targeting non-residential buildings with their products. This is because such automation only pays off above a certain number of heatable rooms. In return, both companies are offering energy savings of between 20 and 40 percent.

Smart technologies are designed to make life easier

These examples show how AI can advance the smart control of buildings. “Artificial intelligence is increasingly becoming a central element of the smart home by learning from user interactions and offering individually tailored automation and solutions,” says Sahin Albayrak, Professor of Agent Technologies at TU Berlin and head of the DAI Lab, which works on smart technology in many different areas. According to Albayrak, the industry is in a transformative phase “where technology not only simplifies everyday tasks, but also significantly improves the quality of life by adapting to the individual needs and lifestyles of users”.

With their innovations, many providers are no longer just focusing on tangible benefits from the smart home, such as energy savings. Technology should make people’s lives easier. This includes tasks in the kitchen, for example. VDE expert Sven Öhrke knows of ovens from well-known manufacturers that use AI to recognize when a cake or roast is perfectly cooked.