Smart Home/Home Automation Testing
Smart home, home automation, and home security products are a growing trend among the techno-savvy consumers. With the reduction in the size and cost of wireless and computer technology, a large number of consumer products have become “smart” in the last few years – from refrigerators to thermostats to crockpots to security cameras. Nowadays, you can not only see what temperature your home is set to, but you can also see what’s in the fridge for dinner and how your meal is cooking.
As a manufacturer, new technology provides you with the opportunity to provide consumers with more control over their homes. However, the challenge then becomes making sure that these new technologies work correctly and work properly with other products. Your customers don’t want to have to fiddle around with settings on their washing machine – they want to just plug it in and have it work. So how do you make sure everything just works for your customer? Have you tested interoperability with other products? Can your washing machine talk to various other wireless routers, for example? How about performance and range of your product? If my washer is too far away from my wireless router, what happens?
NTS is uniquely situated to help manufacturers in the development, testing and certification of the smart home/home automation products. We can test with a wide variety of other home automation products, using protocols such as ZigBee, Z-Wave, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth to see how your product functions. We can perform RF performance and coexistence testing to help you evaluate issues that your customers may see in their own homes, and how you can address them. In addition, we also are able to assist multiple system operators (MSOs) in the roll-out of home automation and home security products to their customers. In addition, we are an authorized ZigBee certification lab, and have test tools specifically focused on validate ZigBee Home Automation, ZigBee Smart Energy, and ZigBee Remote Control profiled products. NTS has also developed an Installer Tool to assist MSOs and installers in the setup and configuration of home automation/home security products.
Contact NTS today to find out about these and other home automation testing services which we can offer.
Updated November 20, 2015