Huawei's new smart home system breaks free from the constraints of mobile terminals

On the eve of 2021, Huawei announced that it will hold a new product launch conference for whole-house intelligence and smart screens, and will also announce a new smart home strategy. With the development of artificial intelligence technology and the improvement of people's living standards in recent years, people are paying more and more attention to the comfort, safety and convenience of their living environment. Therefore, in order to meet the needs of the public, smart home systems have developed rapidly.

Among them, the purpose of the smart home system is to use the Internet of Things technology to enable various devices in the user's home to serve more in accordance with the user's lifestyle, thereby creating a more comfortable, environmentally friendly, convenient and intelligent living environment for the user.

Currently, when users are in a smart home environment, they often use devices such as smartphones and personal computers for entertainment or work. However, when users are away from these devices, they often cannot continue to process events on the devices. For example, users cannot continue to have video conferences with others or process new email notifications.

In other words, the current smart home system cannot free users from the constraints of terminal devices, so the degree of intelligence is low, which also leads to poor user experience. For this reason, Huawei applied for an invention patent called "Smart Home System and Control Method and Device" (application number: 202010464921.9) on May 28, 2020, and the applicant is Huawei Technologies Co., Ltd.

Based on the relevant information currently disclosed by the patent, let us take a look at this smart home system solution.

As shown in the figure above, it is a schematic diagram of the application scenario of the control method of the smart home system invented in the patent. From the upper part of the figure, it can be seen that in the first time period (such as 8 to 9 pm), user A is in the living room and uses the software on the terminal 11 to make a voice call. In the second time period (9 to 10 pm), as shown in the lower part of the figure, the user moves from the living room to the bedroom, and the user leaves the terminal in the living room.

Therefore, during the second time period, since the user and the terminal are separated, it will be difficult for the user to continue to use the software on the terminal for voice calls. At present, people generally use smart terminals at other locations to restart the software and perform corresponding operations. Although the user can continue the voice call, the entire continuation process is cumbersome and time-consuming. Therefore, it is impossible to achieve seamless control on different terminals, resulting in a low level of intelligence of the smart home system and a poor user experience.

With the help of the solution and system invented in this patent, it is possible to achieve seamless connection of software use in such application scenarios. The figure above is a communication diagram of the control method of this smart home system. First, the smart terminal will autonomously detect whether the user is within its visual range, as shown in the figure below:

In this example, the smart terminal is a smart TV, and the shooting angle β of the camera on the smart TV is 90 degrees. When the user is in area 1, the camera can collect the user feature information of the target user, and the smart TV can detect that the target user is within its visual range; when the target user is in area 2, the camera cannot collect the user feature information of the target user, and the smart TV determines that the user is not within its visual range.

Assuming that when a user stays in front of a certain screen, the user terminal sends a screen paging indication to the control center. After receiving the paging request sent by the control center, the monitoring device starts to monitor the user. In this way, the user's location can be always grasped, so that the software and other services that the user is using can be displayed on the screen closest to the user, thereby bringing a seamless intelligent experience to the user. The figure below is a schematic diagram of the application scenario of this solution.

As shown in the figure, before 9 o'clock, the user is in the first area, and the user is talking to Mike at this time. At 9:10, the user moves to the second area. At this time, the system will monitor the user's location changes at any time, and transfer the call interface to the screen of the second area, thereby giving the user a good experience.

The above is the smart home system and its control method invented by Huawei. This solution enables users to continue to use target applications seamlessly in different areas, helping users get rid of the constraints of mobile phones and other terminals. While allowing users to enjoy the convenience brought by the smart home system, it also improves the intelligence level of the smart home system.