Future home

The – future intelligent home projects have started in various countries.

Meritie believes that the home automation is good when you don’t notice it. Furthermore we believe that many projects have started technology oriented.

We believe that the best results can be achieved when we use wisely the installed sensors. In many cases we have seen that the sensors have only one purpose. We believe that the same sensors can be used also when you are at home. Not only when you are out of your home.

For instance – why should you use your PIR infrared sensors only when you are not home? The PIR infrared sensors can also be used when you are at home for various tasks – like controlling music, lights, temperature, etc. Of course there are new technologies that you can implement and use for this purpose. We also believe in some of these new technologies. We are also going to implement them in near future.

We also believe that other business areas offer interesting solutions that haven’t been applied into homes. For instance think about the modern cars. They have board computers; they have temperature sensors, sensors evaluating the car engine, doors, etc.

Our question was why don’t we have these in our homes? The home we build or buy is a very large investment - many times 10 times more than the car. How expensive can it be to integrate these technologies from cars into homes?

We believe that it’s very important to know more about your home.

We have made studies of monitoring the house itself – inside temperatures and outside temperatures, moisture detection – inside walls, temperature between the walls, etc.

To control and monitor devices are basic functions. This is automatically integrated into the systems.

The biggest challenge will be the user-interfaces. We have developed several user-interfaces. We don’t know what is the right one as there are many possibilities. This can be a RF-433 key ring like used in the cars. These can be identified and each user can have different kind of key ring. What means that users have different interfaces / or profiles.

We have also made phone, PDA and computer interfaces. At time being we are developing a DIGI-TV user-interface.

However how does the future look like? Automatic user-interface with bio sensor, finger print, voice?

We believe that the biggest challenges will be around the value chain. The home/house itself with everyone involved will be the biggest challenge. Everyone wants to have a piece of the pie. Therefore we will see companies trying to build systems where only their own devices will work.

Meritie has a different approach. We have built an open architecture where different sensors, devices can be attached. We will even try to support as many as we can.

We do not believe that this market could be entered with single solutions that are not open for third parties.

We believe you should select an open system that allows:

Electricity supply companies to do meter reading and other tasks
Water supply companies to do meter reading and other tasks
Gas supply companies to do meter reading and other tasks
Estate management companies to survey various functions automatically
Elevator information (large houses)
Boilers/heaters – for measuring flows and maintenance
Insurance companies
Construction companies – for monitoring
Surveillance companies
Air-conditioning
Hardware manufacturers
Operators and pricing of various systems

We need all these companies cooperating and much more to make a working solution.

Imagine that you would take parts from various Formula 1 cars. Engine from Williams, gearbox from Ferrari chassis from Mclaren, Do you think that these would fit into one car? Propably not. Then again, a Mclaren or Ferrari is made from various subcontractors. They have meetings, they have the technical documentations and specifications when they all work towards the same goal they get a working car.

The difficulty is that so many players within this business area would like to be the Ferrari or Mclaren. How can the rest benefit from the new inventions. it would be a shame if not some of the invented technologies would end to the street cars one day!

We make working solutions. We integrate the latest sensor technologies with our M2M hardware and software platforms. This allows you to make competitive, full-scale home automation and it’s still affordable. Let us talk what we can do for you ...