My third daughter recently graduated from college with an art degree. I 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 it always requires that the thieves employ ingenious effort to get in and snatch the priceless treasure. They must maneuver through all sorts of security, laser beams, motion detectors, pressure sensors, and the like. How awesome would it 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 upfront investment costs through efficiency savings and in a relatively short amount of time. The connected home promises to bring further automation into the home, linking together disparate technologies, appliances, and devices and coordinating them into a synergistic platform to serve homeowners, 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 helps drive peace-of-mind involves home security and monitoring. Here, we’ll describe 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, control, and communications. Home automation is conveniently remaking the home environment—making it safer and more secure.
