Advancing Health & Wellness via the Smart Home
Part 1: We Need an Updated Vision of a Smart Home
In September 2019, I wrote an Op-Ed for the Baltimore Sun in which I made the case that state and local governments should expand and enhance their Smart Community efforts to recognize that millions of Americans live in smart and connected homes. I argued that the smart home is a viable platform to advance important healthcare objectives including supporting aging in place goals and effective chronic disease management. Initiatives designed to leverage virtual health applications and Remote Patient Monitoring (RPM), I concluded, could save governments billions of dollars, deliver high quality healthcare and wellness programs to residents and improve the overall quality of life in the communities they serve.
The Baltimore Sun Op-Ed — a thought-piece written for an audience of Smart Community project managers — reads differently in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Many of us have a newfound appreciation of the value of our connected homes. Since March 2020 when thousands of schools were shut down and patients were discouraged from visiting their healthcare providers for non-COVID-19 conditions, countless Americans have accessed distance learning and telehealth applications in our homes for the first time. Whereas pre-COVID-19 the case for the smart home as a viable platform to advance health and wellness was theoretical and forward-looking, the case can now be made drawing on the real, lived experience of millions of Americans.
This blog is the first in a series of posts that will make the case for utilizing the smart home as an effective avenue through which we can advance health and wellness. Powered by broadband networks that have been tested during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to deliver reliable connectivity, smart homes can and should be leveraged by policymakers to have a positive on patients, providers and payers (including insurance companies, large employers and state & local governments) and ultimately the communities in which we live.
What do I mean by the term Smart Home?
For many of us, our first image of a smart home came courtesy of The Jetsons. The Jetsons’ flat in Orbit City was characterized by robots and an array of futuristic devices. When the first smart home advertisements and products were released early in the 21st century, however, the technologies bore little resemblance to the vision of automated living illustrated in the Jetsons cartoon. The smart homes of the first 20 years of this century included relatively few robots and automated devices that might wow George and Jane Jetson — the smart refrigerators released in recent years and the ubiquitous Roomba notwithstanding.
Instead, the smart homes of the last two decades have been characterized by home networking solutions (often described as “platforms”) that provide residents with the ability to control connected devices (e.g., thermostats, cameras, automated lights). Initially, the earliest adopters of smart home technologies controlled connected devices via local area networks set-up inside a home. With the explosive growth of smart phones, the increasing ubiquity of Wi-Fi home networks and the widespread availability of Internet-enabled devices, residents of smart homes now control systems in their homes (e.g., HVAC and security systems) remotely and conveniently over Internet Protocol (IP) connections. The smartest of smart home devices can be set up to detect intruders or room temperatures out of a desired range and send automatic notifications and alerts. Most recently, intelligent, voice-controlled assistants (e.g., Amazon’s Alexa) have also become another viable control center for a smart home’s connected systems and devices.
An Evolving Vision of Smart Homes — from Smart Devices to Smart Platforms
Over the last decade, the growth in the market for smart home technologies has not grown in line with sales forecasts. For many, the smart home has been a disappointment. As the author of an 2019 article in Forbes puts it,
“Let’s be frank — my house is as dumb as ever. With all the technological advancements that have taken place over the last decade, you’d think our homes would be a lot ‘smarter’ by now.”
It is understandable that those of us with visions of futuristic smart households complete with robots and intelligent automation might be underwhelmed by available smart home technologies and devices. Lindsay Rothfield’s Tech Time Machine: The Smart Home published in Mashable in 2015, provides a timeline that seems to support a conclusion that the 21st century has been slow to deliver on a 20th century vision of the smart home.
To me, the sense of disappointment about available smart home technologies is related to the high expectations set in part by advertising and, yes, the Jetsons. I am inclined to argue that antiquated thinking is limiting our imagination about the value and utility of the smart home, especially as an avenue to advance health and wellness. To better appreciate the utility and impact of smart homes as an avenue for advancing health, we must shift our gaze from the devices to the platform.
What do I mean by this?
A 2019 Report from the Wireless Broadband Alliance (WBA) observes that the marketplace for the “smart home has evolved from a competition between smart hardware into a competition among intelligent platforms.” I think the observation made in the WBA report is insightful and lends support to two critical conclusions.
· Conclusion #1: The reason that fans of the Jetsons are right to feel let down by the 21st century smart home is that, to date, the communication platforms — and not intelligent devices (e.g., robots) — would seem to reside at the core of a smart home. In other words, at the center of the innovation and the value propositions of the smart home is not the Nest thermostat, the Ring doorbell or the Google Home assistant. Instead, the center of the smart home is the platform that support connected devices.
· Conclusion #2: While there are plenty of us who can get excited about new and cool gadgets and gizmos, far more rare is the person who is fired-up about new wireless connections and platforms. Rather than get excited about the networks or platforms per se, most of us are more interested in the applications that a platform or network delivers. And so it is the case here, the promise of the smart home is the delivery of compelling applications.
The True Value of a Re-imagined Smart Home: It’s the Applications, Stupid
A lot of digital ink has been spilled about the reasons why mass adoption of smart or connected home technologies has lagged — this Information Age article provides an illustrative example of several articles in a similar vein. A crude summary of these articles is something like this: the Bruno, a trash can that features a built-in vacuum and will remind it owner to take out the trash when full, has not found (and will not find) a mass market because its value proposition is not clear. Whereas the smart home technologies that enable residents to save money and reduce greenhouse gas emissions via smart energy management or deliver heightened home safety via smart security systems have driven widespread consumer adoption.
When I think about the distinction between a connected smart home device like the Bruno and the connected smart home devices that support a security application like SimpliSafe, I am reminded of James Carville’s, a campaign advisor to Bill Clinton, admonition to campaign workers to remember that “it’s the economy, stupid.” For when it comes to the promise of smart home to improve our lives, it’s all about the applications, stupid. Bruno is a nifty gadget that offers home and apartment dwellers convenience. Simplisafe provides an innovative service that offers dwellers piece of mind.
The consulting company McKinsey & Co seems to share this assessment. McKinsey examined the Connected Home market and identified nearly a dozen applications in the home that they predicted will be (or will continue to be) disrupted due to smart home technologies including:
Home intelligence
Energy efficiency and Home comfort
Entertainment
WellnessAccess control and Home safety
Daily tasks (e.g. cleaning and maintenance)
With apologies to George and Jane Jetson, we need to replace a Jetsonian vision of the smart home as a location filled with futuristic gadgets. We should instead envision the smart home as providing a location where secure and personalized applications are delivered and fundamentality improve our quality of life. As consumers, businesses and policymakers come to accept this application-centric vision, the smart home’s place as the most commonsensical — perhaps even singular — location to advance health and wellness will become abundantly clear.
Next up?
In the next blog post, I will explore five critical elements needed to advance health and wellness via the smart home: 1) adequate connectivity in a critical mass of homes, 2) compelling applications, 3) clear business case(s) for healthcare providers and payers, 4) a receptive regulatory environment and 5) pilot projects demonstrating positive results.
About this Medium Site
On this Medium site, I explore an array of topics related to the transformative power of smart and connected communities. A central question for this observer of the so-called smart city movement: how will municipalities develop, deploy and support smart and connected community projects at scale?
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