The Mecca for the smart home is for it to act intuitively. Sensors can play a part in that, as Stuart Corner finds out.

In 2021 the NSW Government released its Future Transport Technology Roadmap 2021-2024. Smart sensors featured prominently, earning no fewer than nine mentions.

The roadmap said smart sensors would be “deployed across road and rail networks for improved customer information, service performance and incident response … [to] gather a growing range of rich and real-time data which [will be] consumed by intelligent systems.”

It continued: “Our use of smart sensors and intelligent systems powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning will result in rich real-time customer information, service management, dynamic prioritisation and incident management.”

If that’s what smart sensors can do for transport, what can they do for the home? And, odd as it may seem, Transport for NSW has tried to answer that question, along with a host of others in a page on its website dedicated to ‘Net zero [energy consumption] at home’.

Smart sensors, it says can monitor building conditions and operate lights and blinds automatically.

A compelling, real-world, example of the power of smart sensors in the home can be found by looking at Honey Insurance, a company founded in 2020 that has made smart sensor technology the foundation of its business.

It claims to “use smart technology in a new way to help protect you, and the things that matter most to you.” According to its website, it is “working towards a future where all homes and households are protected from avoidable accidents.” And it is putting its money where its mouth is, offering new home insurance customers $250 worth of smart sensors that “can alert you to avoidable mishaps like fire, water damage and theft.”

Whether the sensors it offers are really smart is a moot point: they can detect the sound of a smoke alarm, a water leak, an open window or door or abnormal temperatures and alert the homeowner via their smartphone.

What makes a sensor smart?

This begs the question: what exactly is a smart sensor as opposed to a dumb sensor? Essentially a smart sensor will not only measure something such as temperature, it will incorporate processing power to analyse the data it collects and take action according to its analysis. Rather than simply measuring and reporting temperature, a smart temperature sensor could generate an alert when the temperature moves beyond a pre-set threshold.

So, smart sensors are not essential, but with only a dumb sensor all the data would have to be transmitted over a network to a central processor capable of undertaking such analysis. In the Honey Insurance example, it is very simple to install the sensors around the home and get alerts to abnormalities on a smartphone app.

Honey Insurance’s smart sensors are all designed to reduce risk, and hence the payouts Honey has to make for fire, flood and other domestic disasters. However, safety is only one aspect of smart sensor usage in the home. They can be deployed to make life easier, reduce energy usage and generally enhance the domestic experience.

Importantly, they can contribute to solving a growing problem in Australia: providing the care needed by an increasingly ageing population.

Smart sensor-based aged care

Smart sensors are an important part of a whole new discipline: gerontechnology. According to a 2019 article in The Hive, the journal of the Australian College of Nursing, “current deliberations with the Royal Commission into the quality and safety of residents in aged care facilities has left providers and their families wondering if smart sensors and cameras could be solutions to facilitate the provision of quality nursing care to residents.”

Volume 4C of the Commission’s report provides details of how one person, Damien Harker, used a phone app, Billy from a company of the same name, linked to a number of sensors in the home of his dementia-suffer father to remotely monitor his activities. (Billy, based in the US, was acquired in 2019 and is no longer operating).

Extensive research on similar applications has been undertaken in Australia. In 2019 aged care provider, McLean Care, with a federal government grant, partnered with researchers from several Australian universities to trial smart home technologies in older people’s homes to understand how smart home devices could support them to live better and independently in their homes. The report that emerged from the project detailed many examples of the use of smart technology to help older people do this.

ASX-listed HSC Technology Group claims to supply “the world’s most awarded aged care specialist sensors, which are not available anywhere else.” Its products, branded Talius, and its business model demonstrate another approach to smart sensor deployment for aged care. Each sensor has a specific, and often quite specialised function such as sensing sleep or a fall.

All are designed to work with the company’s Talius platform which it sees as being deployed by organisations that will offer the Talius sensors and monitoring services to end users. NCIS Group, which describes itself as “a fibre network integration specialist, IT services and IT consulting” company, is one such provider.

Getting smart about energy

Security for the physical aspects of the home and for its occupants are two of the most important applications of smart sensors. Next in line of importance would be energy efficiency.

And a particularly innovative use of smart sensors for domestic energy saving in Australia comes from Pooled (Formerly Pooled Energy. It remotely monitors and manages the temperature and chemistry of domestic swimming pools to optimise hygiene and energy usage. According to Pooled, the average domestic swimming pool can account for a third of the home’s electricity usage. It claims its technology has been installed in more than 1,600 pools in Australia.

The company’s ability to control pools’ heavy usage of electricity gave it the ability to reduce peak electricity demand so it entered the retail electricity supply market. But a ten-fold increase in wholesale electricity prices proved disastrous and its business was sold to smart metering and energy data specialists, Intellihub Group, in mid 2022.

Other smart sensor-enabled energy saving possibilities for homes include:

• Voice-command or motion sensors for cooling or heating units.
• Smart thermostats for centralised control of temperature throughout the home.
• Sensors that detect the level of daylight and adjust indoor lighting accordingly.
• Smart sensors that control garden watering according to the weather.

The options to increase energy efficiency in the home with smart sensors are many and likely only fully exploitable if the homeowner undertakes extensive research or seeks professional advice. However it is always important to conduct a cost/benefit analysis and estimate the savings that will be gained, and over what time.

A claim from one supplier sounds impressive, extolling the virtues of having smart home control that could “easily cut your costs by more than $15,000”. With neither timeframe nor any figure for pre-smart technology costs, such a claim is completely meaningless.

There’s a lesson here: if you plan to deploy smart sensors in your home, you need to think smartly and weigh up costs versus benefits.