AN OSWESTRY business has bolstered its portfolio with the acquisition of company specialising in the "internet of things".

Aico, which is based in Maesbury Road, has bought out Bristol-based Homelync, an award-winning, innovative technology firm that specialises in smart home integration and analytics technology, bringing devices together in the home.

The "internet of things" is the growing idea of making various household appliances connected by the web.

It foresees having various everyday devices make use of internet connections to allow them to provide services for their owners intuitively. The most commonly-cited example is web-connected fridges which are able to add items to your shopping list when you run out of them.

In this case, however, the tie-up is intended to allow people to keep abreast of their home's energy use and safety, which connects with Aico's own expertise. 

Neal Hooper, managing director at Aico, says the deal is good move for the company, which specialise in fire and carbon monoxide detection, as Homelync offers an insight into what the home needs.

“Aico and Homelync is a perfect partnership," said Mr Hooper.

"Aico being the UK market leader in fire and CO detection and Homelync complementing this with advanced data insight and analytics across associated housing environmental sensors including temperature, humidity, energy usage and gas boilers.

"Complementing Aico’s Gateway which provides real time data insight into connected fore and CO alarms within a property, Homelync’s advanced machine learning and analytics of this collective data will provide our customers with state of the art data insight across their connected properties.

"We are extremely excited around the value this is able to bring to customers across the social housing sector and look forward to continuing innovations and progression across the connected home and IoT arena.”

Homelync chief executive officer Luke Loveridge added: “Our vision is to harness new technology to make social housing smarter, safer and more efficient.

"The future close collaboration with Aico will help us accelerate our objectives in this regard. The vendor agnostic, open sensor ecosystem we have developed is 100 per cent complementary to what Ei offers its customers.

"Add to this our team with decades of experience in software, hardware, machine learning and local government, and we believe we have the essential ingredients for a very successful partnership.”

Aico says its acquisition of Homelync will provide a complementary technology platform to present a synergistic approach to IoT, analytics and data management across the connected home arena.