Smart Home Devices to Extend ‘Influence’ to Smart City Programs, Says ABI

The growing power of smart home devices and services will “increasingly extend their influence” outside the home and “into wider smart city programs,” said ABI Research Wednesday. It predicts that over the next five years, smart home and smart city providers “will increasingly leverage the overlap between these two traditionally separate markets as smart home services provide a ready and expandable Smart City IoT resource,” it said. “Large-scale implementations” so far have dominated smart programs, it said. “Increasingly, either these projects will expand to embrace smart home partners, or they will see some of the primary applications encroached upon by progressive smart home providers.” ABI projects that by 2022, the global installed base of nearly 300 million smart homes “will put smart home providers in the position to provide a ready data source for smart city applications,” it said. Though current smart city projects typically address transportation and other infrastructure issues, “increasingly, smart home providers are showing they can deliver similar functionality by adding additional application capabilities for their smart home customer base,” it said. The integration of smart thermostats into “utility demand management programs” is perhaps “the best current example of smart home deployments engaged in driving smart city benefits,” it said.