Sustainable smart home and home automation: Big data analytics approach

Abstract

Popularity of information technology not only changes the facade of data management, but powers smart home and city movement. Despite there are many different types of smart home technologies, lots of them share similar goal of sustainable development. Heaps of these tools improve energy generation or save energy and reduce water wastage. Beyond doubt, some of them achieve the win-win-win co-development in environment, social and economics. In this paper, we firstly discuss three generations of smart home: (1) Bluetooth and Zigbee enables smart technologies, (2) smart home with artificial intelligence and (3) smart home robot which can stroll around home. We then adopt big data analytics method to study the popularity of smart home and home automation searches in Google from 2004 to 2016. Finally, we search for the latest smart home technologies that can achieve the goal of sustainable development. The results show that nations which are keen on smart home and home automation devices do not only restrict on the richest countries in the World. All the top three cities with the largest number of Google searches in home automation over the past decade come from India. They are famous information technology (IT) hubs with many IT personnel. We speculate that interests in smart home/home automation are correlated with residents’ computer literacy rather than economic wealthiness. Besides, the research shows that many of the sustainable home technologies mainly focus on energy saving. Water saving smart home devices only happen once in a blue moon. That may be reflected in the relative high costs in using electricity as compared to water in many cities around the World. In short, the research offers academic, practical and policy contribution.