Several home appliance industry giants, including Samsung, GE, American Standard, Electrolux, Trane, and Arçelik, have joined forces to form a standards organization to build a common language for smart features, applicable to all participating brands. This organization, called the Home Connectivity Alliance (HCA), hopes to release its creations by mid-2022.
HCA will provide functionality for a variety of appliances, including air conditioners, dishwashers, ovens, cooktops, range hoods, washing machines, dryers, water heaters, refrigerators, robotic vacuum cleaners, televisions, and air purifiers and humidifiers/dehumidifiers.
This organization is both a place where manufacturers discuss use cases and considerations, and a place to build these common data models that will allow devices to interoperate using cloud-to-cloud connectivity. This means a Samsung refrigerator could share data with a GE oven, or a Trane air conditioning system could tell a GE humidifier when to turn on during the winter heating season. I don't know why my refrigerator would talk to my oven, but I do think it would be interesting to have all these large, power-hungry devices communicating with a home's electrical management system. I know that system doesn't exist yet, but it will soon.
Yoon Ho Choi, president of HCA and head of IoT business planning and partnerships at Samsung Electronics, stated that the organization aims to help make long-lived consumer devices connected to the cloud more updatable, useful, and able to communicate with each other. This communication won't be at the radio level or through some generic application; instead, the goal is to establish a common data model that allows devices like washing machines to convey what they are (e.g., a washing machine) and share their sensor data in a format that can be understood across brands.
It's similar to the Matter protocol for smart homes. However, HCA is more concerned with creating use cases and data models that enable them to be used across applications offered by appliance manufacturers, smart home platforms, or other options. Choi also mentioned that the organization places great importance on safety and is in negotiations with UL.
HCA is still in its early stages, but the list of members so far is impressive, and I'd like to see some common use cases emerging around cooking, energy conservation, and perhaps resource saving. Ten years from now, with droughts becoming more common and water rationing occurring, for example, smarter devices could communicate with each other to optimize water distribution among themselves. I'd also like to see Whirlpool, LG, and other popular appliance manufacturers join.
Perhaps HCA can prevent the home appliance industry from developing too many isolated smart home ecosystems, especially now that it is becoming increasingly difficult to buy “non-smart” appliances.
It's best to address this issue from the outset. Let's see if HCA can do this, and if it helps drive adoption.
