Wi-Fi helping out Bluetooth smart for an improved home automation user experience

Home automation devices are becoming increasingly popular in the field of consumer electronics. Various appliances like thermostats, smoke detectors, intelligent lighting systems, etc., have appeared on the market to create a smart home. Vendors have the availability over multiple wireless technologies to connect their products to the smart home and communicate with the user. The most adopted technologies are the ones that can interface directly with a mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet, without the need for an additional gateway. Within this context, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are the dominant technologies. In this paper we look at home automation devices that have chosen to solely support Bluetooth 4.0 as communication interface. We highlight the downsides of this technology in a home setting and try to mitigate this problem by exploiting the Wi-Fi capabilities of other devices, in particular smartphones. The proposed solution realizes a Wi-Fi bridge on the smartphone that is connected to the Bluetooth device. This enables other smartphone users to connect to the Bluetooth device over the Wi-Fi network, alleviating some of the downsides of the Bluetooth technology.