EVOLUTION OF THE PERIMETER OF HEALTH SMART HOME

March 05, 2020

Our lifestyles evolve, influenced by numerous technological and sociological evolution also health smart home evolution, reflect these mutations and tend to be composed progressively of ever more communicating objects which will be brought to exchange between them within a more domestic network in addition perfected.

In 30 years, telephony access methods have diversified dramatically, but, in addition, operators have offered convergence offers combining fixed and mobile technologies.

Today, get information on the Internet, communicate via instant messaging software (Windows Live Messenger, Skype), play on the network, consult interactive programs on demand, develop your digital photos without leaving your home, watch and share his photos on a “photo frame” have become possible. This field of digital entertainment is currently booming, all of this is made possible by Internet which is now an essential medium. The television offer is evolving: TNT (Digital Terrestrial Television), offers Internet access providers (Tv ADSL), high definition (HD), repositioning of the Tv satellite offer.

The emergence of a web that calls itself collaborative or cooperative, web says 2.0, a web on which users are not mere consumers of content. Web 2.0 technologies allow users to produce their own content without the specific skills of an engineer. The technologies developed make it easier for as many people as possible to exchange and share this content: wiki, blog, social networks, etc.

This web 2.0 makes it possible to build specific environments for both the private and professional spheres: sharing of calendars, planning, online tools (word processing, etc.) and, more broadly, services that aggregate technological bricks made available to the larger numbers.

The issue of sustainable development accelerates these movements paradoxically by raising the question of the merits of these technologies in this context. A life cycle analysis integrating the design, use and recycling of products and services is essential.

Housing professionals must adapt to technological and societal advances and change their approach to housing, which can take time. In fact if certain technologies are made available to the greatest number of users, usage surveys show the existence of digital divides, both in terms of acquisition or access to technologies and in uses.

HIGH SPEED RATES

In addition to the evolution of infrastructures, the habitat is experiencing an evolution of applications which require ever higher rates, which far exceed those of the voice of the simple telephone line.

In 5 to 10 years, we can predict that access for Very High Speed ​​will be a reality in homes, with connections of up to 100Mbits / s, while waiting for even higher speeds of 1Gbits / s which will arrive with the deployment of optical fiber (FTTH). The “network” prospects are therefore quite optimistic and will make it possible to provide more and more services to housing.

Many users already have ADSL Internet access associated with digital audiovisual services (TV channels or pay movies broadcast in “streaming”) where voice (telephony) becomes a secondary service. Soon, the download of an album of 50 holiday photos in standard definition (3 million pixels) will go from 1 hour (access to 128 Kbit / s) to 40 seconds (access to 10 Mbit / s). In the case of a nomadic worker or teleworking, the Internet user will use collaborative or data storage platforms. Optimal exploitation of these applications, however, requires a speed of 50 Mbit / s.

MORE AND MORE TECHNOLOGIES

The numbers prove it, homes are getting more and more computers, mobile phones, game consoles, set-top-boxes and televisions and other ever more innovative home theaters. We are also seeing more and more communicating objects appear in homes, the digital photo frame is a commercial success at the end of 2018 (forecast of 3.5 million units sold in 2018), the first communicating models are in the process of being to democratize little by little. The Nabaztag continues to be emulated in tech-savvy homes by now detecting RFID chips. The arrival of remotely controllable robots for telepresence services are now available.

More and more of these devices are connected to the Internet but still communicate very little with each other.

HEALTH SMART HOME? (CURRENT TRENDS)

Long-promised health smart home, which had to bring so much to our home, has never managed to establish itself massively in the home and today suffers from a negative resonance for the consumer. If the health smart home of the 1980s has not penetrated the mainstream market so far, its future is now presented in a new light.

“PRODUCT” APPROACH OR ORIENTED APPROACH “SERVICE”

The service approach began with the emergence of telematics in the 1980s with the provision of minitels. The services offered are always more sophisticated and today take possession of the habitat.

The major changes in the services offered to individuals are part of this general principle:

 Video and music on demand over the Internet or other channels will allow individuals to watch the program of their choice in real time at any time of the day.

 The medical surveillance of dependent persons, the guarding of real estate, will offer real-time assistance by specialized operators (health professional, surveillance company, etc.).

 Distance learning applications via the Internet (e-Learning) will encourage participation in interactive courses from home.

 Digital television (TNT or ADSL) distributes a hundred channels by twisted pair cable throughout the house, pending the deployment of HDTV.

 Networking of remotely controllable household appliances (heating, alarm, lighting, etc.) is technically possible thanks to the new IPv6 protocol.

 The demand for network games, whose support (100 Mbit / s) is now a standard on PCs and game consoles, made the success of the broadband offer.

The service is pushing for convergence by interconnecting the various technical subsets in the home. The mere existence of products does not bring this convergence because they are thought in isolation. The services that will develop will add value to the product but also require this convergence through the networking of products. The service design approach is interested in the goal pursued by this service and will in fact have to rely on an ecosystem made up of interrelated products allowing users to act in a social organization with its own dynamic.

There is no doubt that more and more communication functions will be transferred directly to the Internet in the future. For example, we are currently seeing that fixed and mobile telephony and the Internet will gradually converge, in particular by noticing the closeness of operators in these fields.

APPROACH TO THE CONCEPT OF CONVERGENCE

This term “Convergence” has come up repeatedly in recent years and it is true that when we talk about convergence in the field of new technologies, we naturally mean “Digital Convergence”; which can be defined as a concept which tends to merge information, support and transport:

Information is the set of content that physical objects of yesteryear incorporated (photos, music discs, paper documents, audio and video cassettes, etc.) and that digitization has “dematerialized” and therefore transformed into simple “data” (= series of bytes). In common language, content, information, merges with its medium. The photo indicates both the material object support, and the image revealed on the paper.

The medium corresponds to the “physical medium”, the receptacle memory for this information (hard disk or flash memory), in other words everything that contains an increasing number of bytes.

Transport is the passage of information from one point to another in order to be “consumed”, that is to say read, listened to, viewed, copied, … by any network, local or extended , private or public, on a communication medium (cable) or via a form of radio broadcast.

Concretely, the concept of digital convergence is reflected in the fusion of devices that were previously very different, such as the computer with the HI-FI channel, or the telephone with the television; all thanks to the digitization of content and communications.

By extension, convergence is indeed that of equipment and infrastructure, which allows an operator, for example, to move from a profession of content transporter to a profession of editor of its own content and of service provider.

One of the current fundamental vectors of digital convergence is IP (Internet Protocol), an open telecommunications protocol used on the networks (public and private) used to support the Internet. It allows you to split the information to be transmitted into packets, to address these different packets, to transport them independently of each other and finally, to recompose the initial message on arrival. Although this protocol is considered unreliable, it is now widely used.

The trivialization of broadband networks means that today, we are able to pass through this IP network services that previously benefited from their own network. This is the case for example of telephony, radio or more recently television.

HEALTH SMART HOME IN THE ERA OF CONVERGENCE?

At a time of all digital and given this evolution towards digital convergence, it is natural to wonder where is health smart home compared to this one.

Health smart home has developed over several years in the fields of electricity, electronics and automation. Today, we are seeing a change of direction. All manufacturers are in the process of migrating their product range to IP gateways, which is why IT players are increasingly present around health smart home. In addition, IP networks are becoming widespread in the industrial automation sector, and many of these manufacturers are interested in the building sector.

The major technological innovations are now focused on the services that we will be able to provide to the consumer around the product. Hence the need to develop communication gateways to the outside world. To be able to provide service, health smart home and therefore the home must be able to open up to the outside world.

Just like telephony, television, IT, … health smart home is increasingly focusing on this digital convergence. Health smart home manufacturers are on the brink of crossing the technological divide that is IP, so they are logically faced with skills problems that they do not have. This then obliges them, more and more, to call upon service companies specialized in this field; the coming years will therefore certainly confirm this trend, more and more IT and network administrators will logically integrate these companies, and we will then be able to observe a gradual migration of all of these product ranges towards objects of more and more communicative.

THE EXAMPLE OF SHARED PLANNING

The example of shared planning can be taken to support this notion of convergence. At a time when the energy performance of the building is at the heart of the debates, one can very easily highlight the need to make both health smart home and computer systems converge.

Indeed, a management of the occupation of the different rooms of a building is carried out using a shared planning type device, one can imagine sharing this shared planning with health smart home elements (presence detectors for example) deployed in the rooms of this building and thus make it possible to detect the presence or not of people in the premises and thus interact directly with the lighting, heating and even shutters system. Weather services available on the web make it possible to obtain forecasts to anticipate the heating strategies to be implemented in order to optimize energy savings according to the desired comfort.

This is one example among many possibilities where it is very easy to demonstrate the need to develop this convergence between IT and health smart home. Home support is also an example that requires this convergence.