ISSUE FOCUS
How Remote is Remote?
The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Remote Service Monitoring and Maintenance
of Smart Home Installations
By Henry Clifford
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing our
world at a dizzying pace, promising to improve
lives and make us all better, faster, and stronger
(or unemployed!). I spend a considerable
amount of time studying where AI might impact
the smart home, particularly in the arena of
remote monitoring. While this category is still
in its infancy, it promises to affect three key
areas in the coming years. We can call them
“improving the signal-to-noise ratio,” “selfhealing,”
and “moving from artificial intelligence
to intelligence assistance (IA).”
Improving Signal-to-Noise Ratio
Depending on who you ask, remote
monitoring notifications from services like
Domotz, BakPak, and OvrC are anywhere from
one-to-10-percent effective. That’s like saying
your car will only start three to 30 days out of
each year. Professional technology integrators,
like myself, who are on the receiving end of so
much “noise,” tune it out like the boy who cried
“wolf,” rendering remote monitoring tools
worthless without doing a ton of custom
configuration. If everything’s important,
nothing’s important. While it’s possible to dial
42 Residential Tech Today | July/August 2019
in these tools to deliver more meaningful
results, it requires time and expertise that only a
small percentage of current integrators are
willing to invest.
Companies like the video conference
monitoring platform VisibilityOne saw solving
signal-to-noise challenges as paramount, driving
the creation of their product.
“We had a client video conference for over
3,000 people, and the call dropped,” said Von
Bedikian, co-founder and COO of the company.
“Their CIO called me that afternoon and was
very upset. Thanks to our software, we were
able to instantly identify that the issue lay with
the ISP – not us.” Solutions like VisibilityOne
can intelligently keep an eye on much more than
just whether or not a device is on the network.
Video connection quality, component
temperature, and battery life are just a few of the
parameters being measured and analyzed,
delivering more uptime for customers.
Even after a remote monitoring tool delivers a
meaningful result, you still have to decide what
to do with it. This can become incredibly labor
intensive and out of reach for many integrators
to do themselves, giving rise to remote managed
service providers (MSPs) like Parasol and
OneVision Resources (full disclosure: I’m one
of the co-founders of Parasol) who handle
subscriber support issues from network
operations centers staffed around the clock via
phone, text, email, or chat. As integrators decide
to either manage their own remote monitoring
client base or partner with an MSP, AI will
become a much bigger part of the picture.
Self-Healing
AI promises to help with the triage process of
tech support, ultimately leading to self-healing
systems. After delivering meaningful results, AI
can be trained to perform routine tasks like
rebooting devices or acting as a first layer of
technical support before a human is required.
Because professionally installed smart home
technology customers have such high
expectations for their uniquely designed
systems, that’s a tall order. Integrators and MSPs
are reluctant to reboot or fix anything remotely
without taking into consideration what else
might be affected.
Remote AI