How to Live a 'Smart' Life

With the rapid advancements in technology with each passing day, the lifestyles of people have drastically changed with the infusion of technology

‘Smart’ here means automated. As the technology has completely revolutionized the way things used to be back in the day, there is apparently no aspect of life, which has not been affected by the technology.

The term given to this 'smart' technology is 'Internet of Things (IoT)'.

Known as the ‘Internet of Things’, this advancement in the technology has made life very simple and comfortable with the innovation of various easy to use, reliable and safe systems for daily use purpose. The Internet of Things (IoT) is a system of interrelated computing devices, mechanical and digital machines, objects, or people that are offered with the capability to transfer data through a network without having human-to-human or human-to-computer interaction.

Home Automation is a part of IoT, which is a revolutionary technology and it has made our homes equipped with various types of different devices/gadgets, which provides security and facilitate in controlling the different activities of home remotely.

Home Automation is one of the technology innovations, which has drastically revolutionized our home. Commonly known as Smart homes, this is a concept which comprises of various smart gadgets and systems which further combines together to automate the different activities of a house. From automatic doors to window blinds, smoke sensors, theft sensor to automatic lighting, you name it and that is already covered in home automation.

It involves the control and automation of lighting, heating ventilation, air conditioning and security, as well as home appliances such as washers, ovens or refrigerators. Wi-Fi is used for remote monitoring of the system. Advanced systems in general consist of switches and sensors connected to a “gateway" from which the system is controlled through a user interface that is interacted either with a terminal, smartphone, computer or software, frequently however not always through Internet cloud services.

What makes it more fascinating is the fact that everything can be controlled merely by a single tap on your phone. All the automated electronics in the house are connected to you with an application on your mobile.

Home automation suffers from policy fragmentation where most of the home automation devices, in terms of hardware and software, makes the task of creating the applications that work constantly between dissimilar technology ecosystems difficult. Customers might be uncertain to determine the IoT future on proprietary software and hardware devices which uses proprietary protocols that may become hard to customize and interconnect.

Moreover, the nature of home automation devices can also be an issue for security, as bugs are found in the core of operating system which often does not reach users of old and lower-priced devices. Some of the researchers say that the failure of manufacturers in order to sustain old devices with bugs leaves more than 88% of such active devices vulnerable.