Internet of Things: The “Basket of Remotes” Problem

 

We count on WiFi and Bluetooth in our homes, but we don’t have appliances that provide self-description or reliable two-way communication. As a result, the Internet of Things for consumers is, in practice, a Basket of Remotes.

Last Friday, I participated in a tweetchat (#ibmceschat) arranged by friends at IBM. We discussed popular CES topics such as Wearables, Personal Data, Cable and Smart TV, and the Internet of Things. (I can’t help but note that Wikipedia’s disambiguation page bravely calls the IoT “a self-configuring wireless network between objects”. As we’ll see, the self-configuring part is still wishful thinking.)

At one point, the combined pressures of high-speed twittering and 140-characters brevity spurred me to blurt this:

A little bit of background before we rummage through the basket.

In practice, there are two Internets of Things: One version for Industry, and another for Consumers.

The Industrial IoT is alive and well. A gas refinery is a good example: Wired and wireless sensors monitor the environment, data is transmitted to control centers, actuators direct the flow of energy and other activities. And the entire system is managed by IT pros who have the skill, training, and culture — not to mention the staff — to oversee the (literal) myriad unseen devices that control complicated and dangerous processes.

The management of any large corporation’s energy, environment, and safety requires IT professionals whose raison d’être is the mastery of technology. (In my fantasy, I’d eavesdrop on Google’s hypergalactic control center, the corporate Internet of Things that manage the company’s 10 million servers…)

Things aren’t so rosy in the consumer realm.

For consumers, technology should get out of the way — it’s a means, not an end. Consumers don’t have the mindset or training of IT techies, they don’t have the time or focus to build a mental representation of a network of devices, their interactions and failure modes. For example, when my computer connects to the Net, I don’t have to concern myself with the way routers work, how the human-friendly mondaynote.com gets translated into the 78.109.84.91 IP address.

Not so with a home network of IoT objects that connect the heating and cooling systems, security cameras, CO and fire sensors, the washer, dryer, stove, fridge, entertainment devices, and under-the-mattress sleep monitoring pads. This may be an exaggerated example, but even with a small group of objects, how does a normal human configure and manage the network?

For an answer, or lack thereof, we now come back to the Basket of Remotes.

I once visited the home of an engineer who managed software development at an illustrious Silicon Valley company. I was shocked, shocked to see a basket of remotes next to the couch in front of his TV. ‘What? You don’t use a programmable remote to subsume this mess into one elegant device and three of four functions, TV, DVR, VoD, MP3 music?’

‘No, it’s too complicated, too unreliable. Each remote does its separate job well, with an easy mental representation. These dumb devices don’t talk back, there’s no way for a unified remote to ask what state they’re in. So I gave up — I have enough mental puzzles at the office!’

Indeed, so-called “smart” TVs are unable to provide a machine-readable description of the commands they understand (an XML file, also readable by a human, would do). We can’t stand in front of a TV with a “fresh” universal remote – or a smartphone app – touch the Learn button and have the TV wirelessly ship the list of commands it understands…and so on to the next appliance, security system or, if you insist, fridge and toaster.

If an appliance would yield its control and reporting data, an app developer could build a “control center” that would summarize and manage your networked devices. But in the Consumer IoT world, we’re still very far from this desirable state of affairs. A TV can’t even tell a smartphone app if it’s on, what channel it’s tuned to, or which devices is feeding it content. For programmable remotes, it’s easy to get lost as too many TVs don’t even know a command such as Input 2, they only know Next Input. If a human changes the input by walking to the device and pushing a button, the remote is lost. (To say nothing of TVs that don’t have separate On and Off commands, only an On/Off toggle, with the danger of getting out of sync – and no way for the TV to talk back and describe its state…)

Why don’t Consumer Electronics manufacturers provide machine self-description and two-way communication? One possible answer is that they’re engaged in a cost-cutting race to the bottom and thus have no incentive to build more intelligence into their devices. If so, why build unbearably dumb apps in their Smart TVs? (Korean LG Electronics even dug up WebOS for integration into its latest TVs.)

A look at Bang & Olufsen’s Home Integration page might give one hope. The video demo, in B&O’s usual clean luxury style, takes us through from dining to sleep to waking up, opening curtains, making coffee, morning news on TV, and opening the garage door. But it only provides a tightly integrated B&O solution with the need for one or more IT intervention (and it’s expensive — think above $100K for the featured home).

This leaves middle class homes with an unsolved, mixed-vendor Basket of Remotes, a metaphor for the unanswered management challenges in the Consumer IoT space.

— JLG@mondaynote.com

@gassee