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Reporter
The Scottish government is funding education in developing smart home technology.
The Scottish Funding Council, a Scottish government entity, has given over £300,000 to develop educational materials for college students in a program called FUTUREquipped.
The materials created by the Strathclyde University will go to nearly 13 different colleges to give them short lessons about smart home development. There is also hope that this programme will be able to help digitise healthcare facilities and assist medical care in the home.
The lessons take the form of practical things, such as lights and heating, to more forward thinking like energy efficiency and privacy. The materials are available to everyone and there are currently 16 lessons.
The hope for this investment is to grow the economy by investing in future technology, and improving people’s quality of life. The smart home market size is supposed to grow to £42b over the next two years, which is double what it was in 2016, according to research by Statista.
Currently only 5.6m UK homes have smart home technology, but that is predicted to grow by 3m homes in the next year, and double by 2020. It’s expected that by 2023, 40% of UK homes will have smart devices installed.
