Smart home, creating a better life

Song Ping, reporter of Hebei Daily

From AI speakers, smart door locks, to smart kitchens and bathrooms, and smart air conditioners, in recent years, new functions such as intelligent control, remote monitoring, and voice interaction have gradually become popular in home products. Smart home products have gradually entered thousands of households, adding convenience and fun to people’s home life.

As a new scenario in the digital economy, smart homes are not only a new blue ocean with a long industrial chain, many market demands, and great development potential, but also a rigid demand for people to upgrade their consumption and meet their individual spiritual needs.

Smart single product diversification brings a new application experience

At the end of March this year, Hu Yan, a citizen of Shijiazhuang, and his family moved to a new house, and their intelligent life also began.

In the morning, after dinner, put the dishes and chopsticks into the dishwasher, and operate the dishwasher through your mobile phone to wash the dishes and chopsticks, freeing up time for work.

In the morning, Hu Yan, who was in the unit, received a call from the courier brother, and the bottled water arrived. Hu Yan told the courier brother, just put the bottled water at the door, and he can check the door situation monitored by the smart cat eye at any time on his mobile phone;

The old man came to live at home, but it happened that Hu Yan was not at home. He only needed to generate a temporary password on the mobile APP, and the old man could enter it to open the door lock. Hu Yan could also remotely help the old man turn on the air conditioner, TV and other electrical appliances at home through the mobile phone, saving the old man the trouble of operation.

In the new residence, large and small smart home items have brought a lot of convenience to Hu Yan and his family. "For office workers like us who leave early and return late every day, smart home frees our hands and enhances the happiness of living," Hu Yan said.

Unlike Hu Yan, who decided to use smart homes at the beginning of the renovation of his new home, Liu Chenliang, a resident of Qinhuangdao, has added a lot of fashion elements to his old house with smart homes.

He wanted to save effort when cleaning his room, so he bought a sweeping robot. Hoping that drinking water would be more convenient, he installed a water bar that automatically adjusts the water temperature at home. Liu Chenliang’s home has also been equipped with air conditioners and TVs that can be controlled by voice or mobile phone.

Zhang Xiaoxiao, secretary-general of the Hebei Smart Home Industry Alliance, introduced that compared with traditional homes, the biggest advantage of smart homes is that they combine all live electrical appliances into an Internet of Things network to create a personalized smart health scene, improve the safety, convenience, comfort and artistry of the home, and achieve an environmentally friendly and energy-saving living environment. He believes that the arrival of the smart home era does not come with the implementation of a certain technology or a certain product, which is inevitably brought about by the progress of society as a whole.

Intelligent scene of the whole house to better meet individual needs

In the context of new infrastructure, with the rapid development and application of 5G, artificial intelligence and the Internet of Things, smart homes are gradually entering the stage of intelligent interconnection from single product intelligence. When smart home single products emerge one after another, the development of whole house intelligence is also in the ascendant.

Walking into the Huawei Whole House Smart Authorized Experience Hall in Chang’an District, Shijiazhuang City, my finger taps the smart door lock, and when I unlock it with one click through fingerprint identification, the "home mode" is immediately turned on: the curtains are slowly drawn, the living room lights are automatically adjusted to the appropriate brightness, and the security camera is automatically transferred to the "home alert" mode. The whole house is intelligently simplified, and the series of actions after getting home from get off work are realized step by step.

When he arrived at the smart bedroom, an inconspicuous white circular sensor under the bedside caught the reporter’s attention. Tian Yaozheng, the store manager, told the reporter that if the sensor detects that someone gets out of bed and gets up at night, the light strip under the bed will light up, and the bathroom door is also equipped with such a sensor to achieve "the light is on when people come, and the light is off when people leave."

Tian Yaozheng introduced that the whole house intelligence system is installed with Huawei whole house intelligent host. In the whole system, home devices can be interconnected and realize remote human-machine interaction and control. The equipment collects and analyzes user behavior data through self-learning and self-adaptation, and provides users with safer, more comfortable, energy-saving, efficient and convenient personalized services.

When the reporter visited the smart home experience store and the home appliance market, he found that the awareness and acceptance of the whole house intelligence are gradually improving, and the smart home is beginning to penetrate into entertainment, security, elderly care, health care and other scenarios. A variety of human-machine interaction methods make the use of smart home more convenient.

In the living room, activating the viewing mode will adjust the appropriate lighting brightness. In the cloakroom, the three-dimensional smart fitting mirror allows users to intuitively see their fitting effect without trying it on. In the kitchen, the electronic menu on the refrigerator door can be matched with healthy recipes according to the user’s eating habits and existing ingredients; smoke sensors can automatically alarm, and the window pusher can be connected to open the window for ventilation.

When a single product of a smart home is no longer an information island, but a corresponding smart home scenario-based system that collects user data from daily life scenarios and provides accurate personalized services, a smart home can truly become a complete system.

Feng Long, a resident of Ningjin County, has settled his new home in a local smart community. Here, facial recognition unlocks from the gate of the community to the door of the unit, eliminating the trouble of carrying keys, access cards, etc.; in his small home, a "cabin housekeeper" voice assistant can help him switch on multiple functions or scenes such as automatically turning on lights, watching movies, and listening to music. Feng Long told reporters that later, he can also access new smart items in the "cabin housekeeper" system, and set parameters to meet his own personalized needs.

Zhang Xiaoxiao said that on the basis of the smart home system, with smart home products as a tentacle, we can actively obtain consumers’ lifestyle data, integrate rich scenarios with individual needs, and expand the scene experience and value-added services such as clothing, food, housing, learning, entertainment, health care, etc., which will better meet consumers’ needs for convenient, comfortable and personalized intelligent life.

There are still bottlenecks to be broken through, and smart homes are expected to be more compatible

Smart homes can actively adjust home appliance-related parameters according to consumer habits, forming scene service capabilities, which has won the favor of many consumers, especially the younger generation, but also exposed many problems.

In the five months since they lived in their new home, Hu Yan and his family have had troubles while enjoying the convenience of smart home. In order to use different brands of smart home, Hu Yan downloaded three apps on his mobile phone, and needs to switch back and forth between different apps when enjoying smart life.

After Liu Chenliang tried several times to use the sweeping robot to clean, he found that the robot’s collision and steering function made the cleaning miss many dead ends, and the effect was not good.

Zhang Xiaoxiao believes that the lack of innovation in home smart single products and the immaturity of information platforms are still relatively obvious at this stage. The home furnishing market has the characteristics of a wide range of product categories and a relatively scattered industrial chain. Due to the limitation of interoperability standards, the problem that different brands cannot be interconnected is the main crux affecting the user experience. Therefore, to improve the quality of industry development, it is necessary to coordinate the coordinated development of all parties and actively encourage open cooperation.

On August 8, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development, the Ministry of Commerce, and the General Administration of Market Regulation jointly issued the "Action Plan for Promoting the High-Quality Development of the Home Furnishing Industry", which clearly accelerated the construction of the standard system in the field of smart home, carried out basic standard research and standard application demonstration from single product intelligence to equipment interconnection to scene interoperability, promoted the development of industrial mutual trust, interconnection, and interoperability, and encouraged home furnishing enterprises and telecom operators, Internet, construction, and real estate enterprises to strengthen cooperation to promote smart home in more life scenarios. This provides a solution for the accelerated development of new smart home formats.

In the interview, the reporter found that in life, some residents took a fancy to smart homes but did not start. The sudden failure of smart home products, the inability to re-connect the network, and the uneven professional maintenance capabilities are also the doubts of residents.

At the end of last year, Hebei Mobile Smart Home Center was launched, providing a one-stop smart home solution for whole-house intelligent full-scene and full-service around six scenarios: environmental management, intelligent lighting, intelligent control, intelligent protection, intelligent networking and audio-visual entertainment. At the same time as the launch of the smart home center, a professional post-installation and maintenance team for smart homes with professional power knowledge, familiarity with communication network architecture, and proficiency in smart device control and maintenance also came into being.

Liu Qian, product manager of Hebei Mobile Smart Home Center, introduced that the construction of a smart home environment requires not only high-quality products, but also good design solutions and perfect and thoughtful services. Therefore, while developing smart home products, it is necessary to cultivate service personnel with professional service literacy such as digital thinking and intelligent technology, improve the full chain service system of home product enterprises, and promote the high-quality development of the entire smart home industry.