Call your coffee machine

Imagine that all electronic devices in your home - from the coffee machine over the tumble drier to the floor heating in the bathroom or the lights in the living room - could be remote-controlled. Either with the same remote control you are now using for your TV, video and DVD player. By the family PC. Or using a mobile phone with Bluetooth technology.

Technically, this is already possible. But the development of Home Automation has encountered an old, familiar problem: Standards. Or rather: the lack of one common standard. The technologies don't speak the same language. This makes it practically impossible for an average family to install new Home Automation products by themselves. 

But a team of companies, in collaboration with CISS, are working on a solution for this.

"With Jørn Eskildsen, Amfitech, in the lead, we have established OHAP, Open Home Automation Project, which is a non-profit organisation. OHAP has proposed - and described the principles of - an open standard for automation in private homes. In principle, this standard will enable people to a builder's merchant and buy products - for instance a lamp - and if it has the OHAP logo, you'll know that it will be able to communicate with the automation you already have in your home. And it has to be easy to connect. In fact, we have already developed a prototype in accordance with regulations set down by the OHAP group, in a master's thesis."

Vice director of CISS Henrik Schiøler, who is also an associate professor in the department for process control, is keen to talk about Home Automation. For him - and for the other members of OHAP - it is important that automation in private homes is not just something that is built into the houses of the future. It must also be easily installable in already-existing buildings.

"But Home Automation on an open standard is not without problems. Imagine that you have installed surveillance in your home - and that the neighbour can access it through the open standard. Or even worse, that burglars can use your surveillance system to check the house for valuables before they break in. It is not only reliability but also security that are important in new systems like that," Henrik Schiøler points out.