Several big names in the appliance industry, including Samsung, Haier (GE Appliances), American Standard, Electrolux, Trane, and Arçelik, have banded together to create a standards organization to build a common language for smart features that will work across the participating brands. The organization is called the Home Connectivity Alliance and it hopes to have something to show for its creation in mid-2022.
The HCA will set features for various appliances, including air conditioners, dishwashers, ovens, cooktops, range hoods, washers, dryers, water heaters, refrigerators, robot vacuums, televisions, etc air purifiers, and humidifiers/dehumidifiers.
The organization is both a place for manufacturers to discuss use cases and considerations and build out these common data models that will allow appliances to interoperate using a cloud-to-cloud connection. This means a Samsung fridge might be able to share data with a GE oven, or a Trane HVAC system might be able to tell a GE humidifier when to turn on during the winter heating season. I’m not sure why my fridge would want to talk to my oven. Still, I do think it would be interesting to have all of these large electricity-consuming appliances talking to the home’s electrical management system. I know that system doesn’t exist yet, but it will soon.
Initially, there are plenty of practical use cases, such as letting a washer from Brand X communicate through a dryer from Brand Y. If the washer tells the dryer that I just washed a permanent press load, it could ensure the dryer doesn’t get too hot and wrinkle the clothes, without my intervention. Or when I load the dishwasher at night and turn it on, the dishwasher could alert my robot vacuum to clean the kitchen.
Yoon Ho Choi, the president of the HCA and the head of IoT business planning and partnerships at Samsung Electronics, says the organization wants to help make long-lived consumer devices connected to the cloud updatable, more useful, and able to communicate with one another. This communication won’t be at the radio level or through some kind of universal app. Instead, the goal is to build a common data model that lets a device such as a washing machine communicate that it is a washing machine and share its sensor data in a format that can be understood across brands.
If this sounds familiar, it’s similar to the Matter protocol for the smart home. Except with Matter, the focus is on control of devices through a unified app or digital assistant. The HCA is more concerned with creating use cases and data models to enable them across the apps offered by the appliance maker, a smart home platform, or other options. Choi also mentioned that the organization has a big focus on safety, and is in talks with UL.
The HCA is at the early stages but has an impressive list of members so far, and I’d like to see some common use cases emerge around cooking, energy-saving, and perhaps resource conservation. In ten years, as droughts become more common and water rationing occurs, smarter appliances could communicate together to allocate water between them optimally, for example. I’d also like to see Whirlpool, LG, and other popular appliance makers join.
The pain point the appliance industry is trying to solve here isn’t as acute as the pain that has led to the creation of the Matter standard, but I would love to avoid the frustration of too many siloed smart home ecosystems before it became such a sore spot. Perhaps the HCA can forestall that sort of drama with home appliances, especially as it’s becoming more and more difficult to purchase a “dumb” appliance nowadays. Additionally, because appliances typically are expensive and replaced in seven-to-ten-year cycles, it’s not like a consumer will buy a new dryer once they have settled on a smart home platform that works for them.
It’s better to get this right in the beginning. Let’s see if the HCA can do that and if it helps drive adoption.
I’m still struggling to see the real world benefits ,although as you suggest, i guess its better to foster compatibility between manufacturers now in the hope of longer term gains.
To some extent, I could see how this might potentially be used to promote greater safety in the home (eg perhaps if an appliance detected overheating, perhaps it could alert other nearby devices that in turn could switch off or pause processing temporarily…although arguably there are other routes by which this could be performed).
However, i am also a little concerned that this could be used by the bigger industry incumbents to stifle innovation; say, by creating additional hurdles for innovative, smaller firms to overcome – eg in the form of delays, membership fees, certification fees, access to IP, or similar hurdles in order to gain the right to say the product is HCA compliant.
Hopefully that isn’t the case here.
This smells like an attempt to implement a subscription model of some kind for appliances, as well as an opportunity to gain access to more consumer data. Buy an appliance and pay a monthly fee or it won’t work scheme.
I can see advantages to appliances being able to communicate with the home automation hub but cloud access is a pretty blatant data access. As a person whose into automation I wouldn’t want appliances talking directly to each other, only thru the hub.
Hmmmm….
“ Yoon Ho Choi, the president of the HCA and the head of IoT business planning and partnerships at Samsung Electronics…”
My guess, which is purely a guess, is it this is coming out of the drive on the part of some of these really big manufacturers to come up with multiunit IOT solutions for apartment buildings. This has been a big initiative in Asia, and Samsung has been very involved with trying to provide building managers with apps and systems to manage dozens of Samsung smart appliances at once. (In fact, this was the source of the current Windows version of the smartthings app.)
These designs are cloud-dependent because they aren’t being accessed by the people who live in the apartments. It’s considered part of building maintenance.
https://news.microsoft.com/2020/07/13/samsung-and-microsoft-transform-real-estate-and-smart-property-management/
The kind of standard this new organization is offering would make sense for either a real estate development company that had multiple buildings with different appliance brands in different complexes or for property management companies that wanted to allow residents to add their own appliances to the maintenance net. Or just offer a choice of appliance brands in a single building.
I could be completely wrong on this, but there’s a lot of work being done in this area and the fact that Samsung has a Samsung employee setting up the new standard seems significant.