Any home can be a smart home, whether it is a studio apartment or a mansion. An official definition of smart home doesn’t exist. What started as more of a buzzword has entered into a common usage. A smart home is probably best defined as a living area with connected technology meant to enhance the home and goes far beyond smart thermostats, smart lights, smart plugs or outlets, smart door bells, and locks,or voice assistants like Google Assistant or Alexa. The smart home is often already designed as smart by architects or by electricity engineers planning the smart use of energy long before we can have a smart discussion with Alexa.

One is however certain ‒ there is no smart home without data analytics, big data or Internet of things or Blockchain ‒ they are all essential to derive knowledge and support applications for smart homes.

During a conference entitled Smart homes meet innovation and Blockchain and moderated by Dr. Katharina Lasota Heller, attendees heard insightful presentations on smart homes industry. There were two keynote speeches, International patent strategy issues for protecting Smart Home technology by Marc Kaufman from Rimon Law, Washington DC and The possible ways of implementing Bim’s design process at a smart home by Jakub Niebrzydowski - Polish BIM (Building Information Modeling) designer based in Zurich. Besides, Sem David Mattli from BuildingExcellence gave an interesting speech about Innovation Park Central Switzerland. It was a pleasure for us to have such expert speakers from different countries, thanks a lot! 

 Many thanks to our host Innovation Park Central Switzerland and event partner - Crypto Valley Association for strong support. And also thanks to our board members who organised the event: Dr. Katharina - Kasia Lasota Heller, Mathias Ulrich, Kasia Pieniądz, Paweł Sobotkowski as well as to Filip Pawczyński & Artur Pszczółkowski for their support.