CEDIA’s First Future Tech Pavilion to Focus on Energy Management

Amid CEDIA’s most challenging times since its inception some 20 years ago, the organization has added a future technology pavilion to the list of exhibits at the CEDIA Expo in Atlanta Sept. 22-26. The pavilion will showcase emerging trends that could offer business opportunities for custom electronics specialists in unfamiliar areas including sustainability and digital home health care.

David Pedigo, senior director of technology at CEDIA, said a lot of the traditional home entertainment products in the CEDIA pipeline are in a revision cycle, or refinement period, and that has made it difficult for dealers to escape pricing pressures of commoditized electronics. That, combined with weakness in the housing market and the tough economic times, spawned the idea for the pavilion as a way to explore new ways for integrators to apply knowledge of integration, low-voltage electricity and home control to emerging markets. “It was a way to say to our members ‘we're going to get through this,’ and these are some of the things you're going to be offering moving forward,” Pedigo told us. “Not all products are going to be commoditized,” he said. “U.S. electronics systems contractors can offer more of an experience than a specific product."

Energy management will be part of the pavilion and offers near-term solutions to integrators, Pedigo said. Control4 will show its energy management controller and ZigBee will have a wireless circuit breaker on display, with both designed to show the capabilities of remote energy monitoring and control so that integrators’ customers can easily monitor usage and put appliances on timers to avoid peak operating periods. Through simple interfaces that integrators provide, users can “tell a thermostat to go up 2 degrees on a hot day and immediately a dashboard will show that energy consumption has gone down,” he said.

These types of intelligent appliances have been on the radar for years, but Pedigo said they're more of a reality today because of advances in wireless protocols including ZigBee, Z-Wave and Bluetooth. “It’s at the point where it’s significantly easier to pull that off,” he said. GE is a potential exhibitor for home appliances, Pedigo added. CEDIA has identified electric car charging systems as a potential installation area for integrators that could be part of an integrator’s skill set in as little as six months.

Eaton Corp. will demo an electric charging station in the pavilion and CEDIA is trying to secure an electric vehicle as well. Pedigo said a charging station would require more than low-voltage certification on the installation side, but CEDIA dealers could handle low-voltage metadata on the communications end. “Our people are familiar with this type of process where there are some products that are high-voltage and the interface comes in at the low-voltage area,” he said.

With the high-end Tesla currently available and Chevy’s Volt and Nissan’s Leaf electric cars due in the next few months, the market is primed for experts who can take the data from a charging station and “send a message to the TV that the car has finished charging,” he said. Overall, the future pavilion is designed to motivate integrators and “plant seeds for what they should be thinking of now and what it’s going to take to pull it off,” Pedigo said. “What is it that my company will have to do, what are the training requirements I'll need to get for my staff?"

CEDIA’s role, Pedigo said, is education through webinars, meetings, and partnerships with CEA and industry experts. CEDIA’s technology council identifies emerging opportunities and suggests courses for the education department, which develops courses that will be offered within the coming year. Areas may not be well defined early on, he said, “but we can write standards or best practice documents that help shape and inform members about the best way to better serve clients.” In the nascent home health care market, CEDIA is working with AgeTek, a nonprofit group formed in May to promote awareness, benefits and value of products and services for aging Americans.

A panel, “Digital Home Health: What It Is and How It Affects Us All,” will be held at the expo in September. Pedigo said products in this area are just starting to hit the market: “Regulations are murky so we will continue working with AgeTek to provide education to our membership and consumers at large.” Pedigo described digital home health care as “still a little bit of the Wild West,” and said AgeTek is about to launch a certification program. Issues still to be determined include where a CEDIA member’s role in digital health care monitoring starts and stops and what additional certification might be required for CEDIA members.

For the health care section of the pavilion, CEDIA has worked with researchers at Georgia Tech, which plans to show several digital home health care devices including a “sympathetic device” designed for the aging community that monitors patients and looks for patterns to detect signs of depression. A mirror-based product can provide early detection of skin cancer by reading infrared signals from sensors. “You'd be able to tie that information in to your communications devices and send information to your doctor that changes in skin tone have been detected,” Pedigo said. Technology in the pavilion bedroom vignette will integrate remote blood-pressure monitoring, weight-monitoring sensors, a pulse/oxygen meter and other health readings in a user-friendly interface. The living room scene will focus on the future of communications, showing integration of social media within the home tech environment. The pavilion is also covering future applications in home entertainment technology including 3D, 9.1 surround sound and video calibration in a home theater setting.