Smart Watches to get Matter Compatability – First Steps
TL;DR – Recently agreed standards for Home Automation are soon likely to spread to Wearables.
Towards the end of 2022, Apple, Google, Samsung, Amazon and others agreed on the Matter Standard for home automation. These use the Thread network protocol to let your Home Devices work on any platform and are highly likely to come fully on stream in 2023. In English, a simple example would be that your Google Nest 2nd Generation Doorbell should ‘soon’ work in Apple Homekit.
As of today, wearables like the Apple Watch can only be used to manually view and control your home’s smart devices BUT wellness events on the watch cannot be triggers for home events. New standards might soon emerge to allow this. In English, examples might include your watch recognising when you are asleep and then closing smart blinds and turning off smart lights or a fall by an elderly relative could be recognised as a trigger to unlock the front door for emergency services.
More
As the world’s population ages, the need for technology to support ageing-at-home and home healthcare is becoming increasingly important. According to the US National Institute for Health, by 2030, one in five Americans will be 65 or older, highlighting the importance of finding ways to support the growing ageing population. The use of IoT devices can help bridge gaps in healthcare and provide new opportunities to improve our wellness.
To address these challenges, the Zigbee Alliance has recently formed a Health and Wellness Working Group to develop technical standards for the interoperability of health and wellness IoT devices. The goal is to integrate health devices into the smart home ecosystem and enable a trusted approach for sharing health data.
Initially, the group plans to focus on utilizing data from connected smart home devices to support ageing-in-place and independent living. The aim is to provide seniors with greater independence and help them stay in their homes longer. In the future, the group hopes to expand into remote patient monitoring, chronic condition management, and acute care at home.
The success of this initiative will require standardized technology approaches that support interoperability, security, reliability of data, and ease of use. The potential market for supporting ageing-in-place and home healthcare technology and services is tremendous, and the group hopes to drive adoption and scale by focusing on simplicity and trust when connecting devices and services that incorporate health data into the smart home.
Take Out
It’s always good when our smart devices can work more intelligently together. Inevitably many novel and clever uses will come to light as we use them in unexpected ways.
That said, I can’t see too many sports-related uses coming out of these standards and the usefulness here seems very much ‘smart’ focussed.
Original Idea: csa-iot
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I still don’t have any such mesh-type devices – at least, as far as I know 😅. But I’ve read just a few days ago about Thread and how it connects the whole network to the internet via border routers. Technically, very cool, but the network admin in me is getting a headache and wonders how everything will be secured…