"Could Smart Homes Keep People Healthy?"

Earlier this month, the Z-Wave Alliance–a consortium of companies employing Z Wave wireless mesh networking technology in their products–announced that there are now some 600 products incorporating Z-Wave technology available in the United States. At first glance, this is pretty boring tech news. But the implication of the spread of Z-Wave is actually fairly interesting insofar as it points to a rapid proliferation and democratization of so-called “smart home” or “home automation” products and various new uses for those products.

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As a technology, Z-Wave has been around since 2001, when it was created in Denmark by a couple of engineers from Nokia and Erikson. In North America, it didn’t really start to take off until about 2005, when suddenly five large companies adopted Z-Wave at the same time, and the Z-Wave Alliance was born. Its objective, according to Z-Wave Alliance chairman Mark Walters, is to promote the use of Z-Wave technology and its use in home controls. “The key and most important factor is that these products be interoperable with each other,” he says. “The idea is that

you could buy a product from one company, and it would work with a product from another Z-Wave company.”

In 2005, about six products on the market used Z-Wave. By mid-2010 that number was 500, and in the last six months it has jumped again to 600. Part of that jump is due to the adoption of the technology by large service providers like Verizon, which is now using Z-Wave products to offer home monitoring to its customers. Verizon customer can sign up for between $75 and $200, receive “smart” light switches, thermostats and, if they like, controls for other home electronics and appliances, and then pay $10 a month for monitoring services from Verizon that will enable them to remotely monitor energy use, turn the lights or thermostat on or off, and even program the lights and thermostat to turn off and on at certain times of the day.

This sort of home automation used to be the realm of wealthy tech geeks who would pay anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000 to automate everything in their homes from their TVs to their door locks. Now home automation is becoming more democratized, helped in part by the proliferation of Z-Wave. Walters points to smart light switches as an example: Non Z-Wave switches run about $80 each, while there are comparable Z-Wave switches on the market for as low as $20. “People might want to have the $80 switch in their living room, but they don’t want to spend that kind of money for the switch in their garage,” he says. “Z-Wave gives them the option of mixing and matching.”

But home automation isn’t just about saving energy or money, improving home security, or doing cool tech-y things like dimming the likes and cuing the music with the push of a button. Walters says what people who install automation systems comment on most often is the convenience of them.

When we first got started back in 2005 it was a really AV-centric, high-end home application,” Walters says. “We fought to make it more mainstream, and kept looking for those apps that would bring these products into broad distribution. We thought it was going to be the lights, then the thermostats, then the energy story, but what really pushed us over the top, and I can’t explain it, was when the door locks came. Z-Wave door locks and the ability to put the Z-Wave network on the internet so you could access your system from your smart phone … that combination really pushed it over the top in the last 18 to 24 months. People really like to be able to get an SMS when someone enters their home, and lock or unlock their doors remotely. Since that started to happen, we’ve put in close to 2 million internet-connected Z-Wave doorways in North America.

Walters says home automation could be the next frontier in healthcare as well. That statement stands in stark contrast to complaints from some health advocacy groups who have warned that the growth of the smart grid, including smart homes, could lead to health concerns along the lines of those that continue to mount around cell phone usage. Nonetheless, there may be some unforeseen health benefits to smart homes.

The applications we talk about the most now are energy and security, but I think that will shift to aging independently,” Walters says. “We have a lot of people in this country who will need some sort of assistance to age independently and technology will have to step in. And that could be in the form of simple things like the lights coming on softly when you wake up at 3am to go to the bathroom, so that you don’t have a blinding 100-percent light that causes you to blink, trip on your slippers, and break a hip.

If a smart home system could keep track of when a person gets up and goes to bed, and follow them around during day, it could even have an algorithm that tells us when dementia has set in, Walters says. “Admittedly, that’s kind of creepy. But if you think about it – motion detectors that turn the lights on for you are pretty innocuous and there’s value in that as an older person. Also, early onset of dementia is brought on 80 percent of the time by problems with medication. If you knew that there was a sudden change in the cognitive ability of your parent a week or two after it happened, then you could go to the doctor and say hey something has changed, and in many cases it’s probably a medication issue that is fixable.”

The potential health-focused applications for smart homes go on from there–smart refrigerators could track nutrition, for example, while smart ovens could help the disabled to perform cooking tasks that are otherwise difficult. In the meantime, cheaper, basic systems that enable consumers to reduce their energy usage will shave 10 percent off the average monthly utility bill, and the first generation of EV owners will likely need home monitoring systems to ensure that charging their cars doesn’t send their electricity bill through the roof.