TAHI decided to concentrate its efforts on areas where it is likely that activity will or has already taken off because there are strong commercial or political drivers in these sectors. TAHI is promoting smart homes, building intelligence and concentrate on connectivity and working with building developers, local authorities and housing organisations to create clusters of smart homes and with the service providers and manufacturers that provide the systems.

The clusters/sectors as diagram 1 below shows that TAHI has identified are interlinked:

Diagram 1. Showing linkages between ISGs and Interoperability Group

Entertainment and Communication - this area includes all the normal audio visual systems but extend this to triple play with mobile communication and link into other home based systems.

Energy Management & Sustainability - this area includes equipment management and remote monitoring of equipment in the home such as central heating systems, white goods and security systems

Health, Telecare and Community - this area includes sustainable communities, community communication and accessibility issues. It brings communities together by providing a wide range of systems that help people to stay in their own homes longer, provide interactive contact, monitor their well-being and keep them secure.

Building, Construction, Regeneration and Installation - this area concentrates on the what the building industry needs to know and do to make houses smart and exploit the opportunities of connectivity.

Allied to these interlocking sectors and their associated Industry Sector Working Groups is the Interoperability Working Group which has been formed to ensure that the systems in all the identified sectors can work together. The role of the groups together and their outputs is shown below in diagram 2:

Diagram 2. Interaction between ISGs and the IWG in defining requirements and outputs to conformance and standardisation.

In diagram 2 not only do the ISGs develop requirements for the IWG they also work with the IWG to prepare functional specifications whose output will lead to Interoperability Functional Specifications for applications in the home and services to it. There is also likely to be a number of TAHI based consortia carrying out work on behalf of Industry and whose outputs will be taken directly into standardisation.

It is also expected that TAHI Members will become members of Consortia that become engaged in commercial deployment.