The Role of Analytics in Enabling Smarter Homes

The Internet of Things (IoT) has begun to move beyond the hype and is slowly but surely delivering on its promises with more Internet-connected devices than ever before. It reached an estimated penetration rate of 5.3% of homes in North America in 2016. These IoT devices are generating growing volumes of valuable data, which has led to the need for analytics solutions.

Means for Actionable Insights

Analytics solutions are software platforms embedded with algorithms that can identify patterns in data to provide actionable insights. In the residential sector, analytics software can crunch data transmitted from devices within the home. It can also be used with publicly available and third-party data sources on weather, demographics, and home infrastructure to enable a variety of applications, including customer engagement, energy management, monitoring and control, and automation.

Currently, analytics are mostly focused on customer engagement. In the energy industry, utilities are analyzing smart meter data to provide customers with more information about their energy consumption and specific ways in which they can reduce use and save on energy bills. However, customer engagement is only the beginning of what can be done with residential analytics solutions. Stakeholders in this space have only begun to scratch the surface of the available opportunity data has to offer.

Increasing Whole Home Efficiency

Guidehouse Insights expects analytics to foster whole home integration of various connected devices by increasing awareness across multiple facets of the home, from thermostats to door locks to refrigerators to solar panels. Having insight from various devices across the entire home can enable machine learning and artificial intelligence technologies to create comprehensive ecosystems of connected home technologies. Ecosystems like these can act intuitively and think independently of the homeowner, creating smarter and more efficient homes.

This concept of more comprehensive and integrated ecosystems is the key to the success of the smart home, as smarter, more connected, and intuitive homes are expected to play a vital role in the Energy Cloud. Smart homes are expected to act as dynamic grid assets that sell energy back to the grid through distributed energy resources, shed and shift load demand through system optimization, and generally support a more reliable grid. All of this can be done by transitioning the market from a focus on individual purchased connected devices to devices supported by more intelligent technologies, starting with analytics solutions. To learn more about the role analytics play in the smart home, see Guidehouse Insights’ report on Smart Home Data Analytics.