International. The growing power of smart home devices and services will expand their influence outside the home and into broader smart city programs, finds new research from ABI Research, a market forecasting advisory firm that provides strategic guidance on the most compelling transformative technologies.
Over the next five years, smart home and smart city providers will increasingly leverage the overlap between these two traditionally separate markets, as smart home services provide a ready-made and scalable Smart City IoT resource.
"Until now, smart city programs have been dominated by large-scale, broad-scale implementations. Increasingly, any of these projects will expand to encompass smart home partners, or they will see some of the major applications invaded by progressive smart home providers," says Jonathan Collins Research Director of ABI Research.
By 2022, a global installation base of nearly 300 million smart homes will put smart home providers in a position to provide a ready-made data source for smart city applications. Current smart city projects typically address applications including transportation, healthcare provision, environmental management, and more. Increasingly, smart home vendors are proving that they can offer similar functionalities by adding additional application capabilities for their smart home customer base.
Perhaps the best current example of smart home deployments that are dedicated to driving the benefits of smart cities is the integration of smart thermostats into utility demand management programs. Instead of utilities developing their own direct-to-consumer smart home plays, they've turned to smart home players like Nest, Honeywell, and others to deliver remote control over end-user heating and cooling demands to help manage peak loads. ABI Research finds that worldwide by 2022, more than 80 million homes with smart thermostats have control of home heating and cooling linked to smart grid control.
Home security gamers, Vivint and Ring (now part of Amazon), are already offering video surveillance features using external smart home cameras. Vivint's Streety app offers shared video access to subscribers within a fixed neighborhood, replicating smart city video monitoring of public spaces, but through a crowdsourcing model. Other applications are still in their early stages.
Parking management is an often addressed smart city app, but the rise of crowdsourcing parking solutions presents another smart home opportunity. Although still in its early days, the potential of crowdsourced parking services to integrate into broader smart home management features such as access control or electric vehicle charging could prove compelling integration controllers.
