When the robot industry pours into the home, the complexity of the home scene has brought to the fore common problems in the industry, such as repeated data collection, inconsistent technical paths, and lack of standards.
At the 2026 China Home Appliances and Consumer Electronics Expo (AWE2026), Qu Zongfeng, vice president of the China Home Appliances Research Institute, released the “Smart Home Industry Standardization Work Roadmap” (hereinafter referred to as the “Roadmap”), setting out key tasks and goals for smart home standardization.
Qu Zongfeng introduced that the “Roadmap” has four major innovation highlights.
First, for the first time, an independent subsystem of “intelligent utility” has been established in the national industrial standard system, using result indicators such as safety, comfort, health, and personalization that are perceptible, measurable, and evaluable by users as the core of the standard to reverse the inertia of “emphasis on products over experience.”
This means that the smart home industry will pay more attention to users’ actual feelings and experience, rather than just the functions of the product.
Second, strengthen AI safety specifications, and propose original technical provisions such as AI security classification requirements, trusted data specifications, and output content credibility assessment to address new risks such as hallucinatory output, unauthorized operations, and privacy leaks caused by large models in applications such as voice assistants and home butlers.
At a time when AI technology is widely used in smart homes, it is crucial to ensure user information security and privacy.
Third, to cover the new needs of the elderly and closely align with my country’s aging trend, the “age-friendly” is listed as one of the 11 secondary categories of the smart utility standard, covering the entire chain of requirements from “hardware structure – software interaction – service model”.
This reflects the smart home industry’s care for the elderly and enables smart home products to better meet the needs of the elderly.
Fourth, highlight the adaptation of large models, and clarify technical path requirements such as localized deployment of large models, lightweight inference, and terminal-cloud collaborative training in the terminal standards; stipulate in the scene standards capability evaluation methods such as multi-modal intent understanding, long-term memory modeling, and personalized service generation.
This will help promote the effective application of large models in the smart home field and improve the intelligence level of smart homes.
He said that standards are the “universal language” and “common rules” between technological innovation and industrial application, and are the basic and strategic support to guide the high-quality development of the industry.
The “Roadmap” will focus on conducting research and building a smart home industry standard system framework, sorting out and summarizing the details of industry technical standards, analyzing and defining product scope and classification tables and other key tasks.
At the “Smart Home Industry Innovation Development and Standardization Conference” held at the same time as AWE2026, some participating experts said that the outbreak of AI is redefining the value of “interconnection”.
Based on technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and big data, the “intelligent agent” capability is given to the home, allowing it to shift from encouraging operations to interconnected collaboration; interconnection based on multiple categories and all scenarios makes new whole-house intelligent experiences such as AI active perception, natural interaction, and active service possible.
Qu Zongfeng systematically introduced the progress of standard development at the meeting. Currently, five mandatory national standard drafts including “Smart Home Interconnection Part 1: LAN Access Requirements” have been formed, covering the entire technology chain from underlying connection, interactive control, product modeling to security baseline.
Experts at the meeting suggested that industry enterprises should be organized to promote App and other imported products to take the lead in realizing international adaptation, laying an interactive foundation for the interconnection of smart devices throughout the house; relying on open source support, promoting terminal equipment and network bridges to achieve national standards on a large scale, providing a rich product foundation for upper-layer applications; at the same time, promoting home gateways, smart speakers, smart refrigerators, etc. as the “decision-making center” of the home to build a local interconnection and connection infrastructure for smart homes.
The “Opinions on the In-depth Implementation of the “Artificial Intelligence +” Action” issued by the State Council pointed out that it is necessary to cultivate a new generation of intelligent terminals such as intelligent robots, smart homes, and smart wearables, and create an integrated intelligent interactive environment covering all scenarios.
According to the “Roadmap”, it is expected that by 2030, terminal product standards will cover all categories of smart home terminals, scene standards will cover all smart home scenarios, and utility standards will cover all elements of user needs, supporting the continuous enhancement of the high-quality development capabilities of the smart home industry.
