The Potential for Smart Home Beacons

Beacons are an emerging category of devices that deliver greater network awareness of individuals and their location, usually within a building, through recognizing and tracking nearby mobile devices. However, while beacons are increasingly finding support and adoption in commercial and retail environments, adoption in the smart home has been limited so far, as system providers seem reticent to engage with the technology.

Either hardware- or software-based beacon functionality typically enables Bluetooth smart devices to transmit, receive, and log the identity of Bluetooth-enabled devices when within range. Within the trusted environment of the home, they offer the potential for a smart home-controlled environment to react to the presence of an individual in order to personalize the settings in the space.

Beacons have been touted as potential smart home material for some years, and there are a handful of players that launched and promoted offerings in the space.

• BeaconThings is an app developed by obycode to integrate iBeacon technology with the Samsung SmartThings smart home system. The company pairs its app with beacons from radius networks.
• Another app developer, Flowing Labs, launched its Beacon Action app leveraging Estimote Beacons.
• The Beecon iOS app from Beaconsandwich extends smart home control to iOS.
• EKOOR has its own beacons that operate with both Beecon iOS and iBeacon.
• The Zuli smartplug is an example of a smart home device that has embedded beacon support; in this case, it is based on Apple’s iBeacon sensing capabilities.

However, offerings such as these have yet to gain significant traction and still rely on savvy end users to develop and integrate them.

Beacons could allow consumers and smart home providers to automate home entertainment and security systems, energy usage, and more, through the proximity of the residents’ smartphones.

However, a reluctance among smart home providers to leverage the technology exists. System providers, as diverse as Crestron and Apple, both maintain that there is little incentive or demand to bring beacons to the smart home at present. This is notable, as both companies support beacons as a technology; Crestron includes beacons in some of its commercial products and Apple has a clear commitment to beacon adoption and integration with its iBeacon infrastructure. Both maintain that there is a level of consumer discomfort related to beacons and the level of tracking they might enable within the home environment.

Smart home players such as Apple, Google, and Samsung could all leverage the ability of beacons to integrate tightly with smartphones. This would extend each of their plays in the smart home. In addition, smart home device players could layer beacon functionality into the growing list of Bluetooth supporting smart home nodes, extending the functionality and value of their offerings. Service providers that bundle a package of smart home devices into a subscription service could also leverage beacons to offer more responsive, more automated services without significant equipment costs.

However, the opportunity for beacons in the home may not be open-ended. Increasingly, a beacon’s ability to dynamically automate the individualization of the smart home environment could instead fall to the smart home management platform itself, leveraging an ability to recognize occupants through other sensors including video, audio, and biometric sensing.

Even so, while the focus for promoters of beacon technology currently remains away from the smart home environment and is dominated by the demands and opportunities of separate markets, such as retail, ABI Research does believe that if properly integrated into a smart home system, beacons could extend the appeal and value of smart home adoption.