Sometimes I ask myself what is domotics. It would be easy to open a dictionary and give you a classic definition. But still it wouldn’t be sufficient to understand what domotics is.

When it first came out, there was a lot of hype around domotics. Suddenly people was feeling like Star Trek, touching a world where computers can make everything possible at just the press of a button. Wireless technologies and Artificial Intelligence kept this hype over the years, but the market is now realizing an incontrovertible truth: domotics is failing.

Why we look for a smart home? I believe the answer to this question is: “quality of life“. When dealing with the automation of our homes, this can be translated in: “reduce the time we spend for boring activities and improve the number of comforts we can benefit from”. I find these two goals to be conflicting requirements: usually if you want to have more you also have to work harder. And it’s here that technology comes into the game: with domotics we can have more by doing less. At least, this is the promise that domotics made to us. But we got cheated.

What if domotics’ overhead gives you more work than directly doing the tasks domotics is intended for? This is something unacceptable for an end-user. Setting up and using a domotic system can be hard and tedious. First introduced to help simplify life, domotics eventually gets to complicate it for both developers and end-users. Unfriendly UIs, platforms fragmentation and lack of technical standards are only a few of the technical problems which affects home automation.

With this scenario in mind we are trying to reverse the course. We are working hard for it, and will need every possible contribution to succeed. We are on a mission to save domotics.

AbCthings