How Green Is Your Smart House: Looking Back to the Original Concept of the Smart House

Abstract

The smart house has been a growing field of interest among researchers and entrepreneurs in recent years. The smart house is designed to create a high quality of life based on technologies of functional automation within residential buildings. It provides a platform to monitor and control certain appliances in the house environment. The concept of the smart house is discussed in this chapter. An in-depth literature study of the smart house was conducted to establish smart house principles and parameters, then these were compared with the principles and parameters of the green house to identified the similarities and the differences between those two concepts. Concept and parameter implementation of the smart house in practice was investigated through a field survey and online materials. Japan, as one of the leading countries in smart house technology, was chosen as a case study. Six smart houses were selected to evaluate the concept implementation and compare smart house concepts with those of the green house. The results showed that the smart house concept and the green house concept have an intersection of sets relationship. The intersection set parameters are the parameters included in the principles of respect for users, conservation of energy and water, and working with the climate.