Matter for a smarter home: Bonus Content
Transcript
Raymond Yin:
Welcome to a special episode of Mouser's podcast series, highlighting questions that didn't make it into our regular episodes. As a subscriber to Mouser's newsletter, you're hearing this content. First, thank you for your continued support and be sure to explore the rest of our Empowering Innovation Together content series at mouser.com/empowering-innovation.
We've got a couple of questions from our Mouser audience. Should there be special consideration in Matter compliant design in terms of security? In other words, when an engineer is designing a Matter device, are there some security considerations that they should be looking at?
Chris LePré:
Definitely, and that's maybe something that I probably should have clarified earlier, that while we have product security as a separate working group Matter is an extremely secure protocol. We've put lots and lots of effort into there. In fact, there's a white paper on our website with 10 criteria of security that we have prioritized in its creation. And I will point to that as 10 criteria that you, as developers, can make sure you're not undoing. You know, as you're going into our code and changing things, you're keeping those in place, you know, and it’s of course security in depth agility for the future. If you have to change something from one type of encryption or one curve that very easily swap in another curve, should one be magically broken by GPT 5 or some other magical computer in the future. So that's extremely important. Those types of considerations are probably the right way to do that. But it's all standard security programming. That's a nice place to start with those 10 criteria.
Raymond Yin:
Looking for an engineer, looking at those, making sure that they understand them and just really implementing them as is.
Chris LePré:
Yeah, exactly.
Raymond Yin:
Okay. When you talk about Matter with people, how often do you really kind of see it in their eyes once they get us, like in our discussion today? I mean, when you talked about aging in place, that to me was an “aha” moment. Do you often see those when you talk to people about Matter?
Chris LePré:
Yeah, I almost always see it. Sometimes people's eyes glaze over with standards, right? Oh, I work in standards. Oh, interesting. You know and then they're already walking away. So as long as it's not a conversation like that, if they really give me 30 seconds, give me the elevator pitch, then yeah, I almost always get that sort of “aha” moment. That's another reason to get up in the morning.
Raymond Yin:
Yeah. For me, when we were talking about aging in place, that just “bing” light came on, like that's brilliant. Looking at Matter, we've got Matter 1.0. I mean, I assume there's going to be a 2.0 and a 3.0, so on and so forth as it unifies the home and then eventually different healthcare aspects. How far do you really see it going?
Chris LePré:
Well, we're thinking of about Matter 1.1 and 1.2, not 2.0. Someday we may have to cross that bridge. Lots and lots of protocols have to cross that bridge and we're sort of doing our best to both prepare for it and to never have it happen. At the same time, I think we can really start to expand what people think of as a smart home. Vatted TVs. We can start to add fireplaces and other devices that people don't expect to be connected. Toothbrushes, coffee pots, those kinds of things. And really start to expand the footprint of what your smart home is and how it can help you potentially start to go grocery shopping at that point in time or if it is in the health and wellness space, make sure you have the medicine that you need based on how much medicine you're consuming.
We've been getting a lot of interest outside of the home into smart building. If there starts to become a ubiquitous Matter motion sensor, there's no reason that smart building shouldn't use that same motion sensor. And the energy management problem is even bigger in buildings than it is in homes. If we can move into that space, then our footprint on the energy management side becomes bigger and bigger. I envision that happens, and it might be different. The problems that smart buildings have just in terms of installation are quite different. You know, buildings get built with no power, no internet, all those everything's put in, and then the power comes and then a couple weeks later the internet comes. And so, how that's not the pairing mechanism that we've defined here. So, for smart buildings, there's going be, need to be a different solution for that.
So hopefully we can solve that problem to get into some smart buildings. And also smart city, even bigger problem. Bigger. Bigger. If you're detecting how many people are walking by the park for the lighting that's in the park, you know, again these are motion sensors. There's a network, they're signaling, it's all the same but different. I think hopefully these are concentric circles of problems to solve that Matter has a nice core to solve, and is someone else going to solve it earlier and then sort of block Matter out of it? Well, maybe because that's not our focus areas today, but hopefully that can all happen in an interoperable way where all the data can start to flow up into databases that can really help people solve problems. And then even just everywhere else in terms of problems like cold chain truck tracking, lost puppy and dog, and child tracking, all the other problems that happen outside of homes, outside of buildings, outside of parks.
Probably an NBIOT or a LoRaWAN type solution. Again, that's just a data model. Running over a network, Matter does solve lots of those middle layer problems there as well. And so, in those different trajectories, that's probably where I see, at least, Matter going in the long, long, long run. And then also on the hospital side, if there is hospital at home happening with really high-quality devices, could some of those devices potentially be moving into hospitals as well? We work with a group called the Center for Medical Interoperability that's really interested in that data liquidity problem. There is lots of data. If you've been in a hospital room for a couple of days, there's tons and tons of data on you in that hospital room. And sometimes it's valuable lifesaving data that can't get out of that. But if we're bringing Matter into that situation, now we can get that data out. Not so much an interoperability problem, but a liquidity problem. Can we get it out of there and then start to crunch those numbers and say, we're operating on you for this reason, but we've got this data on you, and you've got this other problem, let's start working on that right away, or just inform you of that kind of thing, because of all that data.
Raymond Yin:
Like you say, concentric circles operating on same principles, just different scale, different arrangements, but all the same problems, right?
Chris LePré:
Yeah. And all of that lowest little thing, different scale is a huge piece. And solving that problem for different scale is a huge problem, and it's not one that we have the bandwidth or the right members even to focus on today, but you're talking about the long, long, long run. That's why I see things that could potentially go into that direction. But right now, yeah, we're really focused on Matter and seven working groups that we talked about earlier.
Raymond Yin:
Okay. Awesome. Thank you so much for being on The Tech Between Us.
Chris LePré:
Raymond, thank you so much for having me.
Raymond Yin:
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