Emile Nijssen and Stefan Witkamp, two Creative Technology students at the University of Twente and the young Dutch entrepreneurs behind Athom, launched their Homey Kickstarter campaign today. Homey is a new consumer product that brings home automation to a whole new level by incorporating entertainment systems, multimedia and online accounts into home automation combined with natural voice control. The goal of the Kickstarter campaign, which everyone can back, is a hundred thousand euros.
"Everyone has more and more smart devices nowadays, but because they are all operated separately, homes and environments as a whole remain dumb," says Stefan Witkamp, cofounder of Athom who is responsible for the marketing of Homey. "What's more, current home automation is only aimed at home appliances and operation by apps, two unnecessary limitations." Apart from supporting all remote-controlled home appliances, the new product also features support for multimedia systems like SONOS, media centres and television sets, and is able to connect to online services such as social networks, calendar and mail providers and weather forecasts. "This way, all devices and services you use complement each other in a simple way to make your life a lot easier."
Plug and Play
Homey is 'plug and play' and voice controlled. Using natural interaction, the entire home can be controlled. "We see that controlling your home by the use of an app is ideal for on the go, but at home, it takes longer than just flipping a switch. This made us decide to implement speech recognition for a swift and painless experience." Apart from speech recognition, Homey also features a mobile app for iPhone and Android devices, as well as a website that customers can login to to control their home.
Eight wireless technologies and a microphone array
To control all devices in the house, Homey features eight different wireless technologies. "Our goal is to provide a solution for all devices, since in practice, there is hardly ever just one technological standard for everything," says Emile Nijssen, cofounder of Athom who is responsible for the technological development of Homey. "That's why we built in support for the newest home automation protocols like Zigbee and Zwave, but also for example Infrared." Apart from these technologies, Homey contains an array of multiple microphones for the best speech recognition. "Only the best experience is good enough. Therefore, next to a very user-friendly setup and interface, we have opted for an array of microphones to improve sound recording and reduce background noise."
Future-proof with appPlatform
Homey is an open platform, for which developers can build apps themselves. "This way, we keep our product and platform future-proof: support can be provided for devices that currently don't even exist yet," states Witkamp. "It also allows developers to easily make use of Homey's capacity to connect with homebrew projects or less mainstream devices," adds Nijssen. They aim to let third parties extend the functionality of the product, like is currently being done with smartphones.
More information
Athom is a start-up by Stefan Witkamp and Emile Nijssen, two young entrepreneurs who met at the University of Twente. With support from the university and multiple startup networks, they developed Homey. Using the Kickstarter campaign, they strive to collect a hundred thousand euros to produce the product, which is now working as a prototype, on a larger scale and make it perfectly suited for the consumer market. The Kickstarter campaign runs until 27 June 2014. The Homey can be pre-ordered on Kickstarter for 229 euros or less.
Contact for the press: UT Science Information Officer Janneke van den Elshout, MA, +31 (0)6 13950017.
