Key Foundation Technologies

The home-automation market has proved so far to be an elusive fantasy. For many decades, authors have been writing about automation throughout the home and the benefits it will offer us. However, the vision has yet to materialize. Why? Cost and complexity have traditionally been the primary inhibitors. "We currentlyA0use 10 different protocols to connect to 10 different systems," explains Jay McLellan, CEO of Home Automation, Inc. "It is straightforward to integrateA0security, temperature, and lighting, which we do for most of our customers. But beyond that, standards and critical mass are needed to have control over other appliances."

Some companies have tried to leverage A/C house wiring, piggybacking some level of functionality onto that preexisting infrastructure. However, all they wound up being able to do was control the power to something electrical (a light, for example) plugged into the A/C and at a cost of $20 or $30 per decoding devicenot a real boon to automation. An alternative vision holds that homes of the future will be built with a separate Ethernet network throughout, providing a data path for far more functionality.

X10

X10 is an A/C wireline communication technology introduced in the mid-1970s. It is somewhat challenging to encode digital information onto high-voltage wires and to do so without affecting the appliances (in the form of "hum"). As a result, only a modest amount of information can be encoded and to only a fairly small number of target devices. X10 is quite useful for turning appliances such as lights on or off (or perhaps to dim them) and is currently the most popular home-automation network. Relatively inexpensive endpoint devices allow individual "power" control of appliances. Radio Shack, Home Depot, and other mass retailers have been selling X10 devices for two decades. Over the years, new devices have been created to allow your home computer to talk to the network and have more detailed program control over the usage. The newer desires for automation, however, stretch beyond basic A/C on-off control for appliances; we want to reach inside and control appliance/device operation and discover details of their content, usage, and maintenance, and we want to do this remotely with ease and low cost.

The Inescapable Data vision is different. It's not wiredits wireless. According to this vision, the number of conventional home devices that will come equipped with some amount of wireless networking and some simple self-describing set of capabilities via XML will be surprising. It will be as standard and ubiquitous as UPC codesthe critical mass of standard devices Jay McLellan wants to see. The Inescapable Data interface will be out there, waiting to be exploited by us (and a vast array of commercial enterprises).

Before diving deeper into the subject of Inescapable Data in the home, it is important to review the key technologies that will be at the heart of the Inescapable Data in the home:

• RFID tags and readers

• Wireless networking

• XML