Phone home and switch on the oven says Nokia

Stan Beer
Tuesday, 02 December 2008 14:57

Business IT - Technology

Home is where the heart is and, if mobile phone colossus Nokia has its way, it will soon be a place where a smart mobile phone control centre lives. Nokia has launched a new open platform designed to enable users to remotely control devices in their home from their mobile phone.

Nokia Home Control Center is a solution based on an open Linux based platform enabling the home owner to build a technology-neutral smart home that can be controlled with a mobile phone, using a unified user interface.

According to Nokia, its new platform supports the most common smart home technologies, including Z-Wave as well as enabling the incorporation for proprietary technologies.

The problem for smart home technologies is that there are very few clearly dominant standards that govern the integration of different devices.

As Nokia points out, putting it all together is like trying to build a house from blocks that do not fit with each other.

Having smart refrigerators, energy-saving washing machines, climate control, security systems, programmable thermostats, self-adjusting curtains, configurable set-top boxes, and self-operating yard lights sounds nice. But not if you have to have a remote control for each device.

Z-Wave, ZigBee, and KNX are all attempts to define a common command language for home networks. So far, there has not been a clear winner in the battle for the de facto standard of home networks.

Nokia's assumption is that a future home will use several different technologies. Therefore when the development of a common language fails,  Nokia's answer is to build a dictionary

The Nokia Home Control Center acts as a dictionary that translates different technological languages so that they can be presented in a unified user interface. The platform is also designed to group different physical devices, including those from different manufacturers, to be presented for the user in an easy-to-understand way.

The Nokia solution consists of four main components:

1.    The Nokia Home Control Center built on top of standard gateway architecture.

2.    Two control nodes in the mobile phone and web browser.

3.    The back-end server architecture to link  a mobile device and the home gateway.

4.    The third party partner devices.

According to Nokia, it will be possible for example to monitor and control electricity usage, to swich devices on and off, and monitor different objects, such as temperature, camera, and motion. Nokia claims the platform covers everything from a basic security solution to a more sophisticated heating control system.

Nokia is running a partner program for companies that are developing home solutions with the aim to integrate state-of-the-art solutions from each area to the framework so that the systems can be controlled via a mobile device. The aim is to provide systems with remote access via the same user interface regardless if you use a mobile phone, web browser or an internet tablet, also enabling the different home systems to talk to each other.

Nokia will offer full API documentation, a library of basic control logic functions and development support for parties that decide to integrate their systems to Nokia framework.