Smart home has three components: hardware, software, and communication protocols. It has a wide variety of applications for the digital consumer. Some of the areas of home automation led IoT enabled connectivity, such as: lighting control, gardening, safety and security, air quality, water-quality monitoring, voice assistants, switches, locks, energy, and water meters.

Advanced smart home components include: IoT sensors, gateways, protocols, firmware, cloud computing, databases, middleware, and gateways. IoT cloud can be divided into a platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS).

The smart home application updates the home database in the cloud to allow remote people access it and get the latest status of the home. A typical IoT platform contains device security and authentication, message brokers and message queuing, device administration, protocols, data collection, visualization, analysis capabilities, integration with other web services, scalability, APIs for real-time information flow and open-source libraries. IoT sensors for home automation are known by their sensing capabilities, such as: temperature, lux, water level, air composition, surveillance video cameras, voice/sound, pressure, humidity, accelerometers, infrared, vibrations and ultrasonic. Some of the most used smart home sensors are temperature sensors, most are digital sensors, but some are analogy and can be extremely accurate. Lux sensors measure the luminosity. Water level ultrasonic sensors.

Float level sensors offer a more precise measurement capability to IoT developers. Air composition sensors are used by developers to measure specific components in the air: CO monitoring, hydrogen gas levels measuring, nitrogen oxide measure, hazardous gas levels. Most of them have a heating time, which means that it requires a certain time before presenting accurate values. It relies on detecting gas components on a surface only after the surface is heated enough, values start to show up. Video cameras for surveillance and analytics. A range of cameras, with a high-speed connection. Using Raspberry Pi processor is recommended as its camera module is very efficient due to its flex connector, connected directly to the board.

Sound detectors are widely used for monitoring purposes, detecting sounds and acting accordingly. Some can even detect ultra-low levels of noise, and fine tune among various noise levels.

Humidity sensors sense the humidity levels in the air for smart homes. Its accuracy and precision depend on the sensor design and placement.