Smart home chips leading the way to independence

Smart home chips are helping families
Most families have an elderly or disabled relatives that they need to care for and this can be particularly difficult when they need to leave the house for shopping, working a part-time job or another reason. For this reason, there is a risk associated with daily living, from wondering if they have taken their pills when you can’t be there to wondering if they have fallen down or done something irresponsible. Many people do not want their relatives in a care home and smart home chips are helping reduce the ambiguity when caring for someone.
 

What do smart home processors do?
A few years ago the internet of things (IoT) interconnected devices were all the rage, they allowed for the easy installation of remote cameras that could feed video to a cloud based solution allowing users to monitor their homes. IoT allowed kitchen fridges sending lists of what was needed to your phone when you were shopping or near a store as a reminder. However, IoT, while a good start, used continuous wireless communication and non-smart systems to deliver the solution. Essentially if you think of people being devices and the devices would not stop talking to one another causing a drain on energy during the communication process. Smart home processors reduce this and make equivalent devices more independent and actually working like people, being independent and passively listening for changes. Data processing is no longer centralized but remote on each device before flagging events need to be reported. 

An example would be the use of AI in each home monitoring camera, originally if a camera sensed movement it would notify the server and then the cloud based solution would send you an email or App alert; if you kept a dog in-doors this was both fun and irritating and the same time. Instead, smart home chips use AI software that when movement is sensed in the same system it will determine if it is the family's dog or an intruder. If nothing then no further action is needed and the system saves energy and reduces user interaction.
These systems are so good they can be used to help detect if a person has fallen over based on the geometry of the person being identified in relation to what it identifies as the floor and other objects such as chairs. The same technology has many different uses but can be used as a way to reduce risk to vulnerable people.

 
How are devices integrating smart home chips?
Smart home processors come in a few different flavors from SMC’s (surface mount chips) that can be soldered to a mainboard reducing the size of a device, or added as an M.2 or mini-PCI board and added to a free slot on the mainboard. Additionally, you can get sealed boxes that contain these smart home chips in systems that have I/O ports for easy setup of batch to small quantity production scales. Most IoT devices are mass produced with smart home chips being SMCs due to size constraints and unit volume sizes of orders. 

The great thing is that smart home chips use SDK tools that abstract the hardware from the solution. A software developer may decide to use a container to build the solution and then download it onto the board and everything just works without needing to worry about firmware and middleware challenges. Major AI container platforms are supported and some smart home chips also come with a few out of the box (OOTB) solutions that just need to be adapted for use making development a very quick process.