Arrayent for Home Controls and Comfort

Arrayent Internet-Connect is the ideal solution to internet connectivity to enable your customers to have increased control, comfort and peace of mind in their lives, at lower cost.

By adding a wireless home area network transceiver (e.g. Wi-Fi module or a Sub-1GHz SoC) to your products on board serial port, your product can then wirelessly connect (via a Wi-Fi access point or Arrayent reference design residential gateway) to Arrayent’s servers in the cloud. There, Arrayent applies its patent pending Web Services Virtualization technology to create a “virtual product” instance to which powerful applications also hosted in the Internet cloud communicate to enhance your customer’s product experience. The Arrayent Internet-Connect server takes care of messaging back down to the physical endpoint in the consumer’s home. With the power of cloud computing at your disposal, product design opportunities are limited only by your team’s imagination. Product examples include:

Push your product’s user interface onto the consumer’s smartphone. Thermostats, irrigation controllers, security systems and water softeners all have low cost button LCD interfaces to save cost. Consequently they are very hard system to use. So it is no surprise that 50% of the programmable thermostats installed do not display the correct time. The smartphone enables more intuitive user interface, at much lower cost. Now there is the potential for customer’s to exploit the full potential of your product at a much lower price point.
The market has spoken; the smartphone has become the universal remote of choice. Cable and satellite service providers already have smartphone apps to manage your TV viewing experience from smartphone. Why not leverage the smartphone to control thermostats, security systems, blinds, radios and more?
Virtualize hardware controller’s expensive processing functions in the cloud. Nobody likes special hardware to be installed in the home because it adds cost, and takes up space. Security companies don’t like installing high cost electronics that take nearly a year to get paid back in high cost service fees. Consumers do not want another box in the home to manage; just look at Microsoft’s failure to connect PC to TVs the past ten years. For example, a very low cost security system can be realized by attaching in home sensors (door, PIR, temperature, etc.) can connect to a “virtualized controller” in the cloud through a very low cost residential gateway. The security panel UI is moved to the smartphone, a controller the consumer carries everywhere. A second example is a very low cost, but “smart thermostat” that is connected to sophisticated machine learning algorithms hosted in the Internet cloud. The product combination maximizes the consumer's comfort and minimizes their energy costs by building a thermodynamic model of the home, learning the occupant’s comfort profile, and combining it with today’s forecasted weather. The actual thermostat can be very cheap, since all the processing power and algorithm complexity is hosted in the cloud, yet save consumers 15% on their energy bills.
When your product is connected to the cloud, it creates an opportunity for you to continually offer more value to your customers. This strategy is a variant of the “land and expand” sales model used by enterprise software companies. For example, take the case of a “smart light switch” – one that incorporates a motion sensor, a light sensor, a power sensor, and an Internet connection enabling the delivery of back-end services. The baseline customer offer may enable energy conservation and remote control – turning off unused lights based on activity levels, and the ability to turn lights on and off remotely from a smartphone. However, over time a smart light switch manufacturer could up sell new value-added services through the original device hardware, such as:

A security/burglar alarm system that sends a SMS or email when unexpected movement is detected.
Learn and automatically replay lighting patterns when the consumer leaves her home to go on vacation.
An elderly care monitoring system that notifies a remote caregiver when a loved one’s common routines (e.g. turn on the tea pot at 9:00AM) do not occur.

Replace an always on PC with a cloud connection. There are many products in the home (e.g. medical monitoring, swimming pool control, irrigation controllers) that are PC based. A decent customer experience requires these PCs to be “always-on”. Pushing this functionality up to the cloud makes a lot of sense from a cost (it costs $100 a year to keep a PC on all the time), maintenance (via automatic software updates) and reliability points of view.