Services in the Digital Home

This paper discusses the future of the Digital Home as a technical platform for end user services at home and in houses, and proposes new service concepts to serve home inhabitants. The paper was written based on the digital home-related research work we have conducted since 2001. The focus in the research work has been on the end user's home services, including welleness, energy monitoring and conservation services in the Digital Home environment. As a technical platform, we introduced the Internet, IP, UPnP, Web and mobile and wireless technologies. We conclude that the office-based IP-networking technology is suitable for home services and it reduces the amount of investments in networks to the level of CE (Consumer Electronics) products for the home. In the paper, we also identify potential service approaches, introduce a technology solution, highlight new interesting commercial trends and propose research priorities for future service challenges in the Digital Home.