Home Automation Market

With the increase in population, rising per capita income and elevated standards of living, it is little surprising that the demand for home automation is also on the rise. With home automation, home-life becomes more convenient and luxurious just by the touch of a button. In today's fast moving world, individuals are forced to lead a busy lifestyle, leaving little time for daily household chores. People generally tend to miss out on simple day-to-day tasks such as turning off lights and fans, lowering thermostat level and activating security system. Thus, busy homeowners yearn for a simple yet powerful system to take charge of the entire home and by automating various home appliances. A home automation system or home control system is one such system available in the present day, which ties up all the individual gadgets and provides the residents with all the benefits of an automated house.

World home automation market is expected to witness robust growth and reach US$2.4 billion by 2010, according to the new market research report of Electronics.ca Publications. The strengthening of existing markets in Europe and the emergence of new markets in Asia, South America and Africa is set to sustain the growth momentum over the next five years. Housing slump in the US is expected to hinder market growth of home automation in North America in the near term.


In order to have a mass-markt for home automation, some issues should be addressed:

Cost: Thousands of nodes are needed to disperse over a building to provide automation, which make the investment quite expensive and unaccessible to middle-class families. Recent technological developments focus on the wireless sensor network (WSN) which reduces the cost of the complicated wiring networks.

Energy: Due to the high node count in the system, having to change or charge the batteries of each wireless sensor evey few days is not feasible. It ask to achieve battery lifetimes of at least several months, better years.

Installation complexity: It is very important to realize that it is the average homeowner or a semi-skilled installer who typically installs the system. The technology must provide simple intuitive installation and require no network management by the user during the lifetime of the installation. Finally the technology must be enable different product types from various vendors to seamless communicate with each other and use each other’s features.

Functionality: Because the current technology didn't offer all the functionally people desired to justify the cost. No one could justify the cost of a system that basically turning lights on and off automatically or control the temperature in the home.