The Smart Home Starter Guide

Homeowner and smart home enthusiast Alex Teo shares key learning points and factors to consider when linking up your home appliances through the net using a smart home system.

- Alex Teo

The smart home industry has seen tremendous growth in the past year. Vendors are expanding their reach into the global market, and more products are developed, giving consumers an abundance of options to set up a smart home. In Singapore, implementing some elements of home automation is getting more and more popular these days as homeowners are looking at renovating their new house, be it HDB, condominium or a landed property. As supply goes with demand, we also see several local startups getting into this industry, collaborating with interior design firms to provide smart home products and services.

One of the current problems of setting up a smart home is that everything seems rather confusing, what devices work with which set up, how to choose the right system, or what other things to buy exactly. These are very common questions that homeowners are trying to figure out.

Launched in 2019, the Matter project (https://csa-iot. org/) is supposed to address device interoperability issues and streamline future products to provide a certain standard of reliability and security. A joint effort by the biggest industry players, such as Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Google and the Zigbee Alliance, Matter’s goal is to offer homeowners a unified smart home interoperability protocol, ensuring smart home devices can work across different ecosystems.

This solves the issue of buying a smart home appliance only to realise that it can only be connected to a specific platform, such as Google Nest or Apple Homekit. As we wait for Matter’s launch, which has been delayed time and time again, this article will serve as a general guide on how to approach setting up a smart home in 2021.