ABI Research foresees a convergence of sorts in the smart home and smart city markets. For example, the company sees 80 million smart thermostats connected to smart grid controllers by 2022.

Smart Thermostats Connected to Smart Grid

There is so much commonality between smart city and smart home initiatives that perhaps it is inevitable that they will either converge or compete – and perhaps the former is more likely than the latter.

It could make sense for utilities to rely on smart thermostats from smart home vendors such as Nest and Honeywell to control heating and cooling and manage peak loads, ABI notes.

“So far, smart city programs have been dominated by broad, large-scale implementations. Increasingly, either these projects will expand to embrace smart home partners, or they will see some of the primary applications encroached upon by progressive smart home providers,” ABI Research Director Jonathan Collins said in a press release.

Current smart city projects include transportation, healthcare provisioning and environmental management. ABI says there will be an installed base of almost 300 million smart home devices by 2022. These will provide data for those and other smart city applications, researchers said.

The report, “The Emerging Role For Smart Homes In The Smart City,” is a product of ABI’s Smart Home research service and also looks at the role of home security vendors such as Vivint and Ring (now part of Amazon) as candidates for this transition. Indeed, Vivint’s Streety provides shared video access within a fixed neighborhood and so already does much the same job as smart city public space monitoring. Still another opportunity is in crowd sourced parking management.