"New smart home": what the Ministry of Construction will spend almost 400 billion on

How much smarter will be at home in Russia? And what will change in general?

Alexey Averkin, Leading Researcher, Laboratory of Artificial Intelligence, Neurotechnology and Business Analytics, PRUE G.V. Plekhanov

What it is? The traditional concept of a smart home includes a home automation system: control and management of light, heating, ventilation and air conditioning, security.

It originated in the 1950s with the advent of household electrical appliances.

The most active period in the development of smart home systems began in the 2000s and 2010s, which was facilitated by the massive spread of wireless technologies, the emergence of smartphones and the improvement of household appliances. So, in the 2010s, such giants of the IT industry as Apple, Samsung and Amazon presented their products and platforms for the smart home.

In Russia, these technologies are currently closely related to technologies of the digital economy, the Internet of things, intelligent environments and wireless sensor networks. Smart home has also been an important part of the smart city concept for three generations. Smart home and smart city technologies are integral parts of the ecosystem of solutions and are developing in three main directions: building and developing networks for these solutions, creating the necessary IT platforms and cooperation with equipment manufacturers.

The Russians named the Smart Home system among the top 10 inventions that drastically changed human life in the 21st century.

A new stage of development. In July 2021, the smart home entered the passport of the digital transformation strategy of the construction industry "Construction, Municipal Services and Housing and Utilities" of the Ministry of Construction worth 393 billion rubles. until 2030. In addition to the "New Smart House" project (a management system for apartment buildings based on IoT technologies - the Internet of Things), it includes the projects "Solving Together" (technology for taking into account public opinion to determine priorities for the development of urban facilities), "Building in one click" (system electronic document flow between developers and the Ministry of Construction) and "Digital infrastructure of housing and communal services".

Unfortunately, the “New Smart Home” project limited itself to notifications of planned outages of hot water (in electronic form) and the filing of electronic applications for redevelopment. It is also planned to create a management system for apartment buildings and housing and communal infrastructure, accessible and adapted for various categories, including, in particular, smart meters.

What will happen? In Russia, unfortunately, the market for private smart homes is in its infancy and, in its classical sense, is not very promising. It is still fragmentary and consists of a large number of attempts by various market players to create and test solutions that will become truly massive and in demand both by real estate owners and developers who can implement them at the stage of building construction.

The market for smart buildings in apartment buildings is likely to develop in our country. Experts estimate the volume of the Smart Home system market in Russia at 9 billion rubles. According to PwC estimates, by 2025, about 7 million devices of the Smart Home system will be sold in the country.

The total economic effect from the introduction of devices in the consumer sector for the period up to 2025 will be about 387 billion rubles. The drivers of its growth, first of all, will be the initiatives of the state. First of all, these will be projects for the formation of the infrastructure of a smart city and smart systems of housing and communal services.

How it works? Traditionally, a smart home consists of various systems and devices:

• heating, ventilation and air conditioning system with remote control;
• lighting control system;
• smart meters, smart grids and solutions integrated with them;
• a security system that works in conjunction with other smart home systems;
• leakage, smoke and others detectors;
• indoor positioning systems.

At the same time, a large number of different protocols are used in smart home systems, not only in collecting data for central processors, but also in making decisions.

It is based on the Internet of Things. Now the Internet of Things not only connects processes in trade and industrial organizations, but is also being introduced into everyday life, especially in the concept of a smart city and smart home.

The Internet of Things is smart devices that can communicate with each other and connect to the network. Nowadays, more things are connected to the Internet than people.

The Internet of Things is closely related to the concept of intelligent living environment, which is widely recognized as the most general approach to the design, construction and implementation of smart systems. The main advantages of such an environment, towards which the efforts of several international and state programs, as well as the world scientific community are directed, are: integration of all smart systems into one single system; work in a preventive style, allowing to predict changes in the human environment; the use of robots and robotic mechanisms for preventive changes in the environment.

The development of an intelligent living environment is one of the main directions of distributed artificial intelligence, which will soon become dominant in the development of the concept of a smart home.