At 3 a.m., an elderly person living alone falls in the bedroom, but family members are reluctant to install monitoring devices due to privacy concerns; on weekday evenings, children take online classes at home, but parents cannot rush back to accompany and tutor them due to overtime work; during daily commutes to work, the home is left empty with family members and pets, leaving the home status unattended and unexpected situations unknown. These scenarios represent the daily troubles faced by countless Chinese families today. How can they be resolved?
At this year's PT Expo (held at the Beijing Exhibition Center), the author observed that Huawei showcased a complete AItoH solution on its booth. Built on the foundation of beyond-gigabit and 10-gigabit optical networks, as well as Wi-Fi 7, it focuses on four directions: "the elderly, children, pets, and the family as a whole." It attempts to bring the smart home, which previously existed only in PPTs or failed to meet expectations upon implementation, into reality.
At the booth, the author saw that the exhibition area was divided into four zones: Home AI Terminal Entrance, Home AI Large Screen Entrance, Home AI Agent, and Home Smart Health and Elderly Care. It almost replicated the living room, bedroom, and study of an ordinary family exactly as they are.
We wonder, given that the concept of the smart home has been promoted for so many years, why are there still so few that have truly been implemented in ordinary households? Is the "Universal Home AI" of AItoH just a new conceptual hype, or a brand-new starting point for large-scale implementation?
01. Four Hurdles That Have Hindered Smart Homes for Years
To understand the value of AItoH, we must first clearly see where the difficulties in home scenarios actually lie. The author has summarized four hurdles.
The first hurdle lies in elderly care. In China, among the population aged 65 and above, 3 out of every 10 people experience a fall each year, and over 70% of fatal falls occur precisely in the most private spaces such as bedrooms and bathrooms.
Traditional monitoring devices are of little use in these scenarios. Neither the elderly nor their families can easily accept 24-hour monitoring. Relying solely on reviewing footage after the fact means missing the "golden 10 minutes" for first aid. Thus, passive care is essentially not care at all.
The second hurdle lies in children's education. Insufficient parental companionship time and uneven distribution of educational resources are long-standing contradictions. Learning hardware on the market either has fragmented functions or only focuses on answering questions, which cannot be considered true accompanying learning. The industry lacks an integrated hardware and software solution that can provide real-time companionship like a tutor.
The third hurdle lies in pet care. All-day home dynamic perception and real-time data stream feedback of pet status place extremely high demands on the concurrent capability of the home network. Non-beyond-gigabit networks are highly prone to issues such as transmission stuttering, video delay, and data packet loss.
The fourth hurdle lies in the whole-home family itself. IoT (Internet of Things) devices are produced by numerous brands with fragmented ecosystems; a single household might simultaneously run three or four mutually disconnected control systems.
Meanwhile, high-bandwidth services such as 3D movie viewing and ultra-high-definition video require the backing of Wi-Fi 7 and beyond-gigabit bandwidth. In the past, when network failures occurred, they could only be resolved by relying on users to actively report the faults. Furthermore, the industry has long lacked unified standards for construction, renovation, and acceptance, making it difficult to replicate solutions across different regions.
Looking across the industry, the trend has already emerged. As FTTR (Fiber to the Room), beyond-gigabit, and 10-gigabit home optical networks are accelerated in deployment, and Wi-Fi 7 enters more and more living rooms, AI capabilities are extending from the cloud to home scenarios.
AItoH has also moved from demonstration cabinets to live network pilots, with multiple regions sequentially launching commercial packages for elderly care, education, and large-screen services. Home AI seems to be standing at the window period for large-scale implementation.
02. Build the Road First, Then Deliver the Goods: The New Problem-Solving Logic of AItoH
AItoH is not a single standalone product, but a systematic solution built upon beyond-gigabit, 10-gigabit, FTTR, and Wi-Fi 7 whole-home networks. Its core is precisely the "integration of business, cloud, intelligence, network, and devices" repeatedly emphasized by the industry.
In other words, it first solves the problem of "whether the road is wide enough." Only with the support of a network foundation featuring large bandwidth and low latency can multi-channel video streams, multi-screen AI services, and real-time feedback of perceived data have the soil to take root. By overlaying operators and various vertical-domain home business agents, along with the synergy of edge-cloud-device computing power, it provides families with rich smart applications and services.
On this foundation, the author found that Huawei has provided corresponding solutions across four scenario dimensions.
First, targeting "the elderly," the solution adopts Wi-Fi sensing paired with 3D optical sensing. The former senses in the bedroom whether a person has been lying down or sitting for too long without moving. The latter generates a 3D point cloud via LiDAR, identifying only the human body contour and movement amplitude without capturing images. This fundamentally avoids privacy controversies.
When a fall or prolonged stagnation occurs, the system completes identification within seconds and simultaneously alerts children and caregivers via phone, applications, and monitoring large screens.
Second, targeting "children," the AI Smart Home Hub appears in the form of an agent paired with a pointing-learning mirror. The device side detects posture and concentration in real time; children can point at sentences in their textbooks with their fingers to obtain pronunciation, definitions, and translations. The medium-sized screen can also take photos, correct math and essay homework, and generate correction reports.
Third, targeting "pets," the AItoH solution relies on Wi-Fi 7 and beyond-gigabit optical networks to ensure the stable transmission of multi-channel video streams. It overlays AI time-lapse automatic editing, semantic search playback, and two-way voice intercom, allowing users to no longer drag through long videos. They can simply ask via voice, "Show me when the cat jumped on the dining table yesterday," to locate the clip.
Finally, targeting "the family as a whole," voiceprint technology is used to distinguish family members and generate dynamic profiles. The AI Smart Box integrates FTTR, IPTV, and cloud applications into a single large-screen AI service entrance. The AI Smart Home Hub aligns with the current smart medium-screen strategy of operators to create a home medium-screen AI service entrance, achieving unified cross-ecosystem IoT management and breaking down brand barriers. The home network agent realizes the capabilities of proactive fault diagnosis and remote tuning.
03. Behind the Cases: Discovering the Common Foundation for AItoH Implementation
No matter how well a solution is presented, it must ultimately be implemented in reality. Around this exhibition, the author found that operators in multiple regions have already created implementation cases.
The value of these cases does not lie in "launching another package," but in that they each answer the key questions regarding the implementation of smart homes.
First, in the elderly dimension, a county-level nursing home in Heilongjiang implemented the country's first "3D optical sensing + camera + FTTR" smart elderly care benchmark.
This elderly care case, jointly created by multiple industry partners and Huawei, uses high-definition cameras in public areas, Wi-Fi sensing in bedrooms, and LiDAR in bathrooms and beside beds.
These three sensing methods are deployed in layers according to privacy sensitivity, achieving an identification accuracy rate of over 95%. This case proves that "imperceptible monitoring" can be commercialized in highly privacy-sensitive scenarios such as elderly care institutions.
Beijing operators have also launched an elderly care package combining FTTR and 3D optical sensing for only CNY 30 per month. This price is far more noteworthy than the technology itself. Only when monitoring services are reduced to the cost of a cup of coffee do they truly possess the foundation to enter ordinary households.
Second, in the children's care dimension, relying on the AI Smart Home Hub, many provincial operators have packaged AI accompanying learning and homework correction into value-added family education service packages.
For the industry, the highlight of such packages is not the number of functions, but that it transforms the "learning assistant" from a one-time hardware transaction into a sustainably subscribed service for the first time. This can be described as a restructuring of the revenue structure for operators' home businesses.
Third, in the pet scenario dimension, whole-home smart packages from operators in multiple regions have begun to bundle pet AI playback rights. For example, the smart home large-screen products launched by domestic operators support casting pet footage to large screens for care monitoring.
This reflects the future evolution direction of home networks: only beyond-gigabit optical networks can simultaneously carry multi-channel perceived data streams, ensuring that various home smart businesses do not degenerate into flashy but impractical gimmicks.
Finally, in the whole-home family dimension, Hebei operators support using voiceprint family profiles, AI call answering and task handling, and other functions to drive package value addition.
Beijing and Tianjin operators, based on the AI Smart Box and 3D content platforms, have launched 3D movie viewing services, turning experiences like watching sports events in 3D into purchasable services at CNY 30 per month.
Shanxi operators have launched local video 2D-to-3D conversion, promoting business popularization through a pricing of CNY 50 per month; Jiangsu operators, in collaboration with Huawei, implemented the open-source HarmonyOS smart home IoT solution, bringing devices of different brands and ecosystems under unified management; Shanghai and Xinjiang operators have launched HDR Vivid ultra-high-definition zones, promoting the domestic dual Vivid standards.
It is worth mentioning the "AI Home Assistant" jointly released by Shanghai operators and Huawei. It establishes a Wi-Fi interference model for each household, capable of proactively identifying high-bandwidth scenarios such as gaming, online classes, and video conferences, and scheduling the network to ensure a reduction in network latency of over 30%.
Software issues can be automatically fixed remotely, and hardware issues can proactively trigger on-site service calls. The "AI Home Assistant" truly transforms operations and maintenance from "responding after users report faults" to "the network knowing first."
If we look at these cases together, it is not difficult to find that behind them is the same foundation: beyond-gigabit/10-gigabit + Wi-Fi 7, along with a set of standardized AItoH services.
Author's Observation: The Path is Clear, It Is the Right Time to Set Sail
In the author's view, what AItoH truly makes up for is the long-term lack of standardized basis in the construction, renovation, and acceptance phases of smart homes.
Over the past decade, the biggest bottleneck for smart homes has not been technology, but the inability of various solutions to replicate each other and the difficulty of scaling business operations. Once standardization is fully established, the industry can move from fragmented single-product pilots to systematic business operations.
Today, the evolution path of smart homes is actually clear: as beyond-gigabit and Wi-Fi 7 become further popularized, based on the integrated foundation of devices, networks, cloud, and intelligence, home services will upgrade from simple pipeline supply to experience service supply.
Will AItoH become the turning point for smart homes? It is too early to draw a conclusion at present. But at least, at this exhibition, what it showcases is no longer an isolated smart speaker or a television, but a system that can be packaged by operators, replicated across different cities, and purchased on a monthly basis by ordinary households.
When technology begins to revolve around the real problems of families, rather than making families accommodate the technology, the journey of AI entering thousands of households will truly begin.