Perhaps one of the easiest approach towards a simple communication between you and your house can be provided by Norwegian startup Viva. Their service promises that a few simple procedures can help you take your first steps into turning your home smart, without the need of electricians or broad technological understanding.
You begin by obtaining a starter kit, which includes a gateway, a sensor, three smart plugs and the Viva mobile application. The gateway, which you connect into your wi-fi router, works as a communicator that transmits the collected data from your house into the cloud service, which is accessible through the Viva application.
Activity level is the scale that measures the state in which the household is in. When the residents are sleeping and the lights are out, the viva app will put itself into sleep mode, which has a generally lowering effect on all electrical activity in the house (lowering the temperature, switching off all devices that were left on and so forth). Active mode simply does the opposite of this.
What makes the activity level interesting is that it is mostly automatic. The application will keep track of your routines based on your gps location and the data collected from the sensor, and independently sense when the activity level is going to rise or go down. Since it can calculate the time needed to set the temperature on a certain level, it will do it so that you won’t need to wake up feeling cold or equally arrive home from work into a chilly house.
Naturally, these actions are just as much manual as they are automated. When you break routine, it’s easy to keep your Viva system up to date by simply controlling it through the mobile app.
Viva provides more than just a tech detail to your house. When put in charge of the heating system, it can optimally save up to 25% in energy costs, which is, for those who live in the chilly Nordics, a significant save.
With Google’s recent multibillion dollar acquisition of Nest, another tech lab that’s passionate about turning homes smarter, it’s clear the smart home market is a sleeping giant who’s about to wake up. Companies like Viva are going to see an increase in competition, but good innovation might give a selected few a good head start.