A Global Framework for Home Interoperability: Saving Resources While Growing the Market

Much of today's system and application development for digital home electronics is focused on designs that do not necessarily work together or share resources. Homes evolve on an ad hoc basis with different feature sets, making diagnosis of problems difficult. If we cannot guarantee that everything will work together in the digital home, people will not buy new services and applications.

There is thus a need for shared resources and for a reliable way of monitoring systems in the home. This requires middleware, application profiles, and methodologies that allow one market sector to look into another, in order to diagnose and resolve problems.The Application Home Initiative (TAHI) recently launched an Interoperability Framework Standard that aims to provide a framework, rules, and methods that can accommodate existing systems and applications. This article addresses issues of interoperability and examines how applications, products, and services will utilize new technology, such as embedded ARM processors.