Smart Home - the object thinks for itself

After decades of being used almost exclusively in large functional buildings, building automation is now also entering the private sector under the catchword "smart home". Particularly in new buildings, fascinating opportunities are now opening up for architecture to provide even more user comfort, security, resource efficiency and aesthetic quality. In this context, windows in particular are coming into focus as important building elements. The early involvement of VEKA partners as experts both for windows and for the particularly versatile smart home system TEXINO is all the more rewarding.

The trend is strong and it is continuing: The number of people in Germany using a smart home application in the home has been rising steadily for years - by an average of 5 percentage points per year in the period 2018-2021 alone. Most recently, the share was 41 percent, according to a survey conducted by Bitkom, the German IT and telecommunications industry association.

The range of applications mentioned is wide. The most common, at 29%, are smart lighting systems that can implement various lighting scenarios via a smartphone app, for example for a movie night on the sofa at home or a simulated sunrise as an atmospheric counterpart to the morning alarm clock. But the building envelope itself is also automatically adapted to the ambient conditions: 13% of all respondents said they use smart shutters or awnings.

A glance at the list of "smart" devices recorded in the survey gives an idea of the vagueness of the term smart home. In addition to home automation applications in the narrower sense, it also includes smart vacuum cleaners and robotic lawn mowers, which could more accurately be categorized as automated household appliances. Nevertheless, the strong and robust trend suggests that home automation has finally arrived in private homes and apartments.

This change can be attributed to the interplay of several technical developments: Highly miniaturized chips, highly efficient radio protocols, convenient cloud applications and, last but not least, the ubiquity of the smartphone have led to greater acceptance of the smart home concept and simpler systems that can be set up even by technical laymen. However, high-performance solutions with a large number of components still require professional design and implementation.

As a prime example of a networked system, the performance of a smart home is based on just a few different basic components: sensors, actuators, a communication node and a programmable processing unit. Today, the latter is typically located in the cloud belonging to the system.

The term "smart home" is most aptly translated as "thinking home. A home of this kind is therefore able to respond to changes in a meaningful way. But that's not all: The networking of several components makes it possible to bring about comprehensive changes at the push of a button, so to speak - one example is the lighting scenarios mentioned at the beginning, which involve the simultaneous regulation of several light sources.

For architects, these features open up new design possibilities. By specifically adding smart home capabilities to a building, they can respond to the demands of future users to a particular degree. This applies first and foremost to energy efficiency, living comfort and security. But the aesthetic design of interiors in particular can also be made clearer, for example by bringing together controls for lighting, shading or heating in one place.