Some of the most common examples of this would be controlling your house thermostat from your car on they way home. The thought is that as society changes, a controller that programs specific times to turn your HVAC system On and Off is too simple to handle the changing lifestyles.
Lights, cameras, temperature, and moisture sensors are other examples.
What about the sensors that have yet to be created, what about the sensor that has the ability to generate more complex data that involves historic trends. Really smart sensors, that can't be classified as an alarm, or a simple piece of information.
My concern lies with the communication standards that are used to share the sensor information with the 'hub' that connects whole sensor network to the Internet. Those standards can never understand the future and therefore only a limited set of capabilities would be used from the smart sensor. Obviously if the hub and sensor manufacturers are the same or worked closely together, they would just 'make everything work'.
Do smart sensor manufacturers or even the hub manufactures want to play that game?
As a smart sensor manufacturer, we feel like supporting a home automation standard like ZigBee will enhance the exposure of our sensor and all the benefits it can bring to a household but, it does limit some real capability.
Trending is one of those capabilities. Think about the Nest thermostat controller. It basically learns from data and a user can go online and and look at their data over a long period of time. Almost any sensor whose data can be related to the changing seasons, can bring valuable historic data that can be used to understand their surrounding and changing world.
An example:
FilterWatch has the ability to track the clogged percentage of an HVAC system. Suppose you gathered the clogged percentage once a day for a year. In that year, you had been changing your filter at 25% clogged. You then decide to remove all carpets in your house and replace them with wood floors. Changing the filters at 25% clogged resulted in 2 less filters per year. You look at the data for the second year and decide that changing at 20% clogged would add the 2 filters back in each year but your energy savings would be increased by 5%. This can be done because the total number of days between 20% and 25% can be used to make some simple calculations to determine estimated EXTRA run time.
This is where a simple transfer of a certain number of bytes comes in handy. Each byte position is a specific piece of information and a corresponding application understands the position. A corresponding application picks up the bytes and handles the data however way they feel necessary to enhance the the experience to the user.
This is where a Bluetooth Smart sensor connected directly to a mobile device and a corresponding application will excel over a system that incorporates standard communication protocols.
Cheers
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