Digital Twins: Imagining the Future of a Connected Home

The future of the connected home industry is an exciting thing to ponder...Technologists often ask me about what the future looks like for connected homes. The answer involves both technology and people; it means bridging the gap between physical and digital worlds. Software-industrial companies such as Honeywell are already connecting these two worlds with internet-enabled devices to solve everyday problems.

People are getting more comfortable with technology, from a wearable device monitoring your heartbeat to security sensors that keep your home safe while you’re away. Every day, we see new technological advances and new devices that meet people’s needs and proactively learn and adapt to their lifestyles to provide comfort, energy efficiency, security and safety.

Bring in the twins

The future of the connected home is personalized comfort through intelligent devices that can talk to each other. Its foundation lies in a concept called the digital twin – a term that’s becoming more common in our industry, for good reason.

You can think of a digital twin as a virtual persona or a digital profile of any connected device in your home: your security camera, your washing machine, or your thermostat. It gathers information about its physical twin and uses contextual cues from usage patterns and the ecosystem to improve our comfort. Digital twin technology is built on the advancements in Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Big Data and analytics.

The whole point of a digital twin is data-driven decision making. It absorbs behaviors over a period of time using data from our things to start making simple real-time decisions for you and predict future behavior, just like a human personal assistant would. There could be a day in the future when the digital twins of all the connected devices in our homes can be intuitively linked together to autonomously solve gaps in your home comfort, creating a truly self-trained home. This means your thermostat, water leak and freeze detectors, security system to water meter will be able to talk to each other seamlessly to maintain your comfort.

Take a real-life look

Smart devices are intelligent but still need human intervention and lack situational context. With digital twin technology, there exists the potential to make them smarter – adjusting to your preferences. For example, it’s 9:30 p.m. on a typical weeknight and you and your family are watching television in the living room where it’s usually uncomfortably cool. Today, you may have to get up to manually adjust the thermostat settings to keep things cozy. Not anymore with the digital twin. It observes the heating pattern in your living room, and can start building intelligence into the controls. Soon, the temperature can be automatically adjusted every time you’re in that room at night.

The digital twin isn’t just limited to settings for one room or for a particular device. It can adapt to your daily life, creating schedules of events as it’s learning from your family’s needs and usage patterns. Now the late night movie is over, and you’re wishing the warmth from the living room followed you upstairs to the bedroom. It will with the digital twin, which has observed your preferences and predicted what you want to maintain a comfortable environment. 

One less thing to worry about

With digital twin technology, home comfort is one less thing to worry about in your busy schedule. It’s no surprise that Gartner has named digital twin technology as one of the top 10 strategic technology trends to watch out for in 2017. Our engineers at Honeywell are imagining connected intelligent homes of the future that offer personalized comfort, energy savings, security and safety unlocking higher productivity for people. It’s an interesting time to be an engineer today. The limits on what is possible lessen with each technology advancement in the Internet of Things. 

If you’re interested in redefining the vision of a connected home, come join us at Honeywell as we simplify the lives of homeowners around the world and help them control their comfort, security and energy use, all intuitively. I’d love to hear from you.