Abstract
M.Phil. (Engineering Management)
Background
South Africa is reported to be a developing country when investigating new technology adoption internationally. Technology evolution introduced smart home services from the Internet of things paradigm. Smart home products are available in this country. This research contributes by investigating IoT smart home services internationally, technology maturity and feasibility of smart home services in South Africa. Smart home readiness requirements include home automation, home security, home monitoring and life convenience.
Methods
A total of 1936 published articles were retrieved from the initial search on Science Direct and Taylor Francis databases. After exclusion, a total number of 74 articles met all the criterions and were used for data analysis.
Results
The Smart home requirements are a determining factor for the appeal of this technology nation-wide. According to the international protocol standard, IoT is advance and requires a gateway to enable protocol conversion to the traditional network. Services such as smart metering has the highest implementation rate around the world and services for old population management of daily home activities and health monitoring is identified as a potential for SA.
Conclusion
The research concludes on the international standard protocols, products availability and services for deploying a smart home environment. Aspects such as home automation, home monitoring, home security and life convenience are a determining factor for the smart home. The feasibility of smart home service for the old population category is reported as a use case scenario to evaluate readiness in SA. This considers the architecture design readiness, smart home requirements and smart home products availability. Finally, the research proposes the use the IoT Gateway for the protocol conversion ability and as a result the frame work structure for smart home service deployment is used to measure the feasibility of deploying this technology.