This could be the year in which the internet of things (IoT) finally finds its place in the home with business cases becoming sharper and an increasing awareness among housing providers of the potential value that connected devices can offer their organisations.
More and more housing providers are understanding the value that collecting real-time data on their assets can bring. Smart asset management, predictive repair regimes, data-driven asset refresh cycles and ‘first-time fix’ maintenance call-outs are all part of the future that many housing providers are planning for.
Furthermore, there are a few housing providers taking it a step further and starting to assert the position of housing in the smart cities agenda. Housing stock is the third, and often overlooked, pillar in a smart city’s infrastructure. The housing provider of the future will be able to exchange data with the energy grid and the transport infrastructure in order to deliver low cost and green power to residents and contribute to the efficient movement of people and services round the city. Smart cities offer a new way to imagine joined-up public and private services from health and care to energy and they open up new platforms for citizen engagement and democracy. This intelligent and connected approach to homes, infrastructure and transport will become an essential component of an economy that is increasingly driven by information and, crucially, will provide the new types of jobs our residents will require as automation transforms the nature of work.
But before housing takes its place in the smart city, we first need to get the data flowing between homes and landlords. And it all starts with the connected home. Getting homes connected is moving slowly but we predict this year will see the start of a massive increase in the number of connected homes and with it, the first steps towards reconfigured data-driven businesses.
In order to really build the kind of momentum that will see housing providers placing large orders for connected devices and correspondingly changing business processes to support a radically data-driven way of working, we expect to see a step up in the scale of pilots and trials commencing this year. With much of the technology being produced now, there is increasing evidence of its technical capability in its own right. What is missing is both experience of its deployment and evidence of its operational and technical capability beyond a few unit installs. A number of technology providers have told us about their intentions to do what hasn’t so far been done in a housing IoT pilot, and that is to test deployment at scale.
One of the first to kick off will be 365 Agile’s ‘smart heating controller’ pilot. 365 Agile has ambitiously committed to offering 100 housing providers 50 devices each to trial for free. This is exciting stuff and means there could be 5,000 more connected homes coming online over the next few months. With a commitment across the sector to scale up, we will begin to move away from having the odd connected show home to something closer to a connected housing stock.
With scale comes new challenges
A mass roll-out is exactly what’s needed to start testing business cases in practice and it’s here where 365 Agile is one of the first off the mark to get housing providers to actively bring new and so far relatively untested technology into their businesses.
Having 1,000s of connected homes online this year is an exciting prospect as it starts to generate the volume of data that warrants serious analytics and from which accurate trends can be drawn. Installing 50-100 in a single provider is also a significant step; so far, most pilots have involved connecting no more than four devices, and often in the homes of staff members rather than tenants. Medium-scale pilots of 50-100 units raise some operational and technical questions about how this roll-out would be executed and what business processes and systems might need to change to take advantage of the new devices and the data they generate.
From our conversations with housing providers, we have identified some of the key issues that a mid-size roll out will generate:
Resident trust and buy-in
Housing providers will need to find 50-100 residents willing to use new technology which will change their relationship with a key piece of household infrastructure. Residents will need to be on board with the trial and trust the technology, both in a privacy and security sense and in an operational sense. Some form of data-sharing contract is also likely to be needed. Getting over these ‘people issues’ will be a critical part of any large scale roll-out during 2017 and beyond.
Connectivity
The availability of a resident’s wi-fi connection cannot be presumed and even if there is one, accessing it may add more complications. Housing providers need to consider if the properties in which they are trialling have any other form of data connection and if not, how they can use a 4G hotspot to connect the devices. Practical connectivity issues, such as the impact of foil-backed insulation and partition walling on wireless connections and multi-device interference, will also need to become better understood as units are deployed in real-world settings.
Installation
Systems that easily retrofit to existing housing infrastructure, such as thermostats, have some advantage here but operatives will still need some additional training to do this and to support the system in the future. Planning for this is critical to getting installations in quickly and for heating systems, crucially before the end of the heating season!
Asset management integration
One of the key benefits of connected technology is its ability to provide live asset data. Currently, housing and asset management data is relatively static, so new software will be needed to augment this existing data with the potentially vast amounts of new streaming data. This requires housing providers to work with technology firms to understand exactly what data is useful and how it can most usefully be represented.
While some of these issues are likely to be challenging in the short term, the point of a trial of this kind is to face these head on and develop strategies to overcome them. Early technology requires collaboration and housing providers are organisations well situated to share best practice and develop proven operation strategies.
The Connected Home Consortium is helping its members face the challenges of a mid-size implementation to ensure that short-term challenges don’t become long-term barriers that could affect the sector as whole. We ultimately want to see data-driven approaches to housing management, where each connected home functions as part of a larger connected housing stock; from here we open up all sorts of connections to the smart city and beyond.
Jay Saggar is the Connected Home Consortium’s coordinator.
