This paper has reviewed the existing state of home
automation systems, and identified and discussed five areas
that have hindered consumer adoption of such technologies.
Briefly, the areas include: the complexity and expense of the
architectures adopted by existing systems, the intrusiveness of
the system installations, the lack of interoperability between
different home automation technologies, and the lack of
interoperability between systems developed by different
manufacturers that utilize the same technology. Interface
inflexibility and the inconsistent approaches adopted towards
security and safety are also problems. A novel architecture for
a home automation system is proposed and implemented,
using the relatively new communication technology ZigBee.
The use of ZigBee communications technology helps lower
the expense of the system and the intrusiveness of the
respective system installation.