ELLIOT – Experiential Living Lab for the Internet Of Things

Users/Citizens are becoming key contributors to co-create innovative IoT1 based services

The ELLIOT Project The involvement of users/citizens in the research and innovation process of new products and/or services is acquiring a stronger emphasis in current industrial practices, in almost all industrial sectors. However, this is especially true in business domains where users/citizens have a crucial role for the adoptability of new services that they co-create on the top of ICT based technology platforms (i.e. The Internet of Things). These business domains include eHealth, eInclusion, eManufacturing, eParticipation and ICT for Environment as well as ICT for Energy. There is the need to co-create, explore, experiment and evaluate new ideas and artefacts leading to breakthrough scenarios and innovative products and services in engaging customers and users/citizens since the early stage of the R&D process. Traditionally, users where purely considered as observed subjects during the research activities (i.e. ethnographic studies). Today, users/citizens are rather considered as potential co-creators and experimenters that generate new ideas, play with them, feel, sense and interact within real scenarios and prototyped products/services (i.e. contextual design, Virtual and Augmented Reality). This was named “user experience2” in the mid 90s and more recently User eXperience (UX). Besides the traditional usability and testbed, the emerging experiential research and innovation (Living Lab) approach is intended to lead user communities towards group cognition and collective intelligence based on accumulated experience knowledge that enriches technology platforms. Besides reducing development cycles and costs, based on the application of Concurrent Engineering and ICT, this approach of experiential research and innovation allows businesses to design innovative products/services, more likely to be adopted by Society. The need for this user-participative approach is reflected by the uprising of the Living Lab movement. A Living Lab 3 is an open innovation environment in real-life settings in which experiential research and innovation is supported by the availability of a technology platform for designing innovative applications/services. Today, the European Network of Living Labs comprises 212 Living Labs whose maturity level is quite diverse as well as the domain of applications. Most of them are already operational in different domains, spanning from eHealth to Energy Optimisation and Efficiency, from Intelligent Mobility to Inclusion of the elderly and disadvantaged people and Rural Development. In this context, a new research project, named “ELLIOT” (Experiential Living Lab for the Internet of Things) was recently holding his kick-off meeting in Milan on 16th and 17th of September 2010. This project aims to develop an experiential IT platform where users/citizens will be directly involved in co-creating, exploring and experimenting new ideas, concepts and technological artefacts related to applications and services in the Internet of Things. The ELLIOT Experiential approach will be explored and its technology platform experimented within different use cases belonging to three different sectors, namely Logistics, Wellbeing and Environment, in order to validate the capacity for users/citizens to co-create IoT based services:

– San Raffaele Hospital as a City in the City of Milan. Since 1997, HSR has added among its significant assets a specific unit oriented to the Information Technology applications in health domain. This unit, called e-Services for Life and Health4, is specialized in the delivery of services internally to the hospital infrastructure (identification systems, process re-engineering) as well as oriented to innovative domains and disciplines (healthier lifestyle promoting physical activities, good nutrition, social life, interactive

1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_of_Things 2 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_experience 3 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Living_lab 4 http://www.eservices4life.org

ELLIOT – Experiential Living Lab for the Internet Of Things

television, educational games). With a joint activity between doctors, psychologist and engineers, San Raffaele conceived a new kind of user profiling enabling personalized services like outdoor activity monitoring, tour suggestions, performance recording, nutritional advising, edutainment for Pediatrics department and children.

– Design and Use of Intelligent Product Applications in an IoT environment.

Localization of Intelligent Products is an important issue in logistics, which still requires a significant effort in daily processes. Beginning with railway companies searching for their rolling equipment through to logistics service providers who have to deal with high volumes of different kinds of containers which need to be returned to their senders, the localization of resources plays an important role in the industry. In particular, in-door localization, that means the localization of objects inside buildings and thus outside the range of GPS, is not sufficiently solved yet. The experiment consists of allowing users to experience the entire product development process from ideation to prototypical deployment and use. The user group to be involved in co-creation focuses on shop-floor logistics operators (warehouse personnel and foremen), logistics controllers (such as procurement managers) and decision makers in transport and production logistics.

– Green Mobility Services and open innovation. The Green Services scenario is a good

opportunity to walk a step ahead towards a true Internet of Things. In this use case, a flow of data is collected from various mobile sensors ("green watches" and “green vehicles), and fixed sensors (city devices, inhabitants’ balconies)

ELLIOT – Experiential Living Lab for the Internet Of Things

Theses data will be consumed by service users : citizens, city administrators, experts in pollution domains, pupils

The ELLIOT Experiential Platform will allow to exploit collected data and users/citizens will be able to co-create new ways to exploit theses data in relation with other available data to provide for instance: pollution maps of district in a city, keen for public health.

This scenario will be implemented in a single territory with a pool of various players collaborating for designing complex and probably unexpected new IoT based services. Users’ behaviour, the way people set up services, use them individually or collectively will be carefully monitored with great attention to get precious methodological pay-off.

Starting from these three cases, we expect that the ELLIOT project will significantly contribute to a new, user-centric approach to new product/service development in IT by through its experiential IT platform, suitable to be progressively extended to other sectors and industrial domains. ELLIOT is a 3 years project, coordinated by TXT Polymedia, an Italian leading company active in the European market as software vendor and integrator, specialized in Media & Channel Integration. The ELLIOT consortium also comprises:

– Four leading research organisations from 3 European Union Country, involved in user centric and open innovation research topics (the University of Nottingham, the University of Reading, INRIA and BIBA);

– One consulting company from Italy, Collaborative Engineering, involved in Living Labs and Professional Communities set-up and management;

– An SME from France, Vulog, specialised in efficient urban transportation system; – A leading organisation in the Healthcare area from Italy, Fondazione S. Raffaele del Monte

Tabor, involved in the experimentation of innovative treatment processes for its patients; – an independent non-profit organisation from France, FING, helping private businesses,

public sector institutions and national territories to anticipate changes inspired by technology and its uses.

ELLIOT – Experiential Living Lab for the Internet Of Things

The ELLIOT Consortium

TXT Polymedia s.p.a., Italy

www.txtpolymedia.com/

The University of Nottingham, UK

www.nottingham.ac.uk/

BIBA, Germany www.biba.uni-bremen.de/

INRIA France

www.inria.fr/

Collaborative Engineering, Italy www.collaborative-engineering.it

University of Reading, UK

www.reading.ac.uk/

Fondazione Centro San Raffaele del Monte Tabor, Italy

www.fondazionesanraffaele.it/

Fondation Internet Nouvelle Génération, France

fing.org

VU Log s.a.s., France

www.vulog.fr/