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The smart home is just the beginning

29 Nov 2016
The smart home is just the beginning

The smart home is just the beginning

Perhaps the crucible for the Internet of Things (IoT) is the smart home. For a while we have seen advertisements, trade show demonstrations and a host of videos walking us through the ideal, connected, safe home. The idea of sensors sensing where we are and what we are doing is familiar. From heating to security systems to cooking, the idyll has been playing out for some time.

Of course there are challenges to overcome, and many of them. It is a fact of life that the media will pick up on flaws and bad experiences that consumers report, and that presents extra challenges to innovators and suppliers. That does not mean that the virtually unstoppable movement towards that goal of ubiquitous connectivity and intelligence, starting with the home, is threatened – it may just be delayed slightly.

We are facing a number of societal and economic challenges, from an ageing population to climate change. The goal is a cleaner, safer world. Geo-fencing, customer preferences and seamless automation can help us get there. Wikipedia describes a geo-fence as a virtual perimeter for a real-world geographic area that can be dynamically generated—as in a radius around a store or point location, or a geo-fence can be a predefined set of boundaries, like school attendance zones or neighborhood boundaries. An example of geo-fencing and one example of usage involves a location-aware device of a location-based service (LBS) user entering or exiting a geo-fence. This activity could trigger an alert to the device's user as well as messaging to the geo-fence operator. This info, which could contain the location of the device, could be sent to a mobile telephone or an email account.

A roadmap for change


In order to reach the goals of extending the range of IoT connectivity beyond the home there must be a clear roadmap outlining the processes involved so that users or implementers can tick off the milestones as they are passed. This is the focus of a TM Forum proof-of-concept Catalyst project at TM Forum. The smart life: My home, my city, my planet team is working on the foundations that will make the goals come to life.

First, they are working on creating and stabilizing an IoT ecosystem, and infrastructure, on which a wide range of IoT services, devices and lifestyles can be deployed. IoT devices such as temperature sensors in cars and buildings, personal wearable devices, air monitoring units, small roadside weather stations, etc. will be more easily accessible (because they will have communications ability built in) enabling companies to provide solutions to address issues as varied as climate change and an ageing population.

The business case


Clearly, these goals are for the common good but, of course, there needs to be a business case too, so part of the project is to identify the revenue and profit generating opportunities that will be the incentivize businesses to deliver this vision e.g. will they simply make money from manufacturing and supplying the devices, the apps that go with them, the monitoring of the devices, the collection of data from them, the analysis of that data, the support for the devices, customer support for the users of the devices - or simply the connectivity. Apart from the initial cost of the IoT devices and sensors there is the ongoing cost of providing communications to and from the devices and processing the information from them into useful data. Without a viable business case there will be little incentive to invest in the necessary infrastructure.

The Smart life: My home, my city, my planet Catalyst will demonstrate the foundation for an agile IoT ecosystem, how to deliver a broad range of smart digital services (like those listed above) and show how different vertical domains can be interconnected into a seamless service bundle that will have direct impact on our carbon footprint.
This phase of the continuing project will use several TM Forum APIs to explore the issues of:

  • Party – used for party management to create, update and notify of events

  • Partner on-boarding – used in draft form to automate the process of registering and managing partners

  • Privacy management – used in draft form to enable the exchange of data between different components in the Catalyst

  • Billing – used to create a bill for the customer

  • Location – a new API that will be proposed as part of the contribution from the Smart Life Catalyst.


The champions of this Catalyst are major network operators, Orange and NTT, and the participants include ESRI, BaseN, Infonova, NTS Retail and Amdocs.

This team will bring expertise that covers all the key areas, including an IoT platform that can deliver automated, geo-fenced services prescribed by the user and the subsequent billing of those services.

It will build on the previous Smart life: My home, my city, my planet Catalyst, which showed the activation of physical devices (energy, security, temperature control, etc.) triggered automatically based on the location and movement of the customer/citizen, and demonstrated how users can easily see the carbon impact of their actions. This Catalyst will focus on monitoring home devices, and specifically addresses the issues of security and privacy that arise from their usage in potentially unsecured environments like home Wi-Fi networks and the business case around them .

The Catalyst will be demonstrated at TM Forum Live! Asia, in Singapore (December 7-8).