The advanced electronic and computational features exhibited by consumer products and white goods in home premises, and by personal communication devices, make it possible to communicate among heterogeneous objects (white goods, tablets, home automation plants, home theatre). While different devices are even more interconnected and interacting, real market opportunities potentially enabled, do not appear easy to stimulate and create.
The first goal of this project is to move from potential opportunities to sound outcomes, starting from consumer products on the market, to ensure business revenues since the very initial phase. Further, the project will implement research activities aimed at the evolution towards new solutions, innovative business models, and opportunities. To this aim, the project proposes an open, free and accessible “interoperability framework”, as the main backbone and enabling tool for vertical solutions, in different and multifunctional contexts (energy, security, comfort). The proposed activities will change the home into a set of shared and interoperable ecosystems, matching technology and people needs; the living environment will provide traditional home automation functionalities, but also generate actions and feelings exactly designed around the users. This target requires a complete technological sublayer, based on the integration of any possible interface, and ambient and structural sensor networks. Household appliances, furniture, frames, and any other element that may interact with the person in the home, become information sources for the core system, that is in charge of taking decisions and controlling actions. Once the technological sublayer is available, the project will move to the services, by introducing the manager concept, a set of algorithms that do not focus on physical devices but on their functionalities.
Each manager is related to the specific services and functions to be provided: energy manager, comfort manager, safety&security manager. The information sharing paradigm, that qualifies the framework for interoperability, will represent the common element in the project activities, and will make it possible for the whole “home system” to share its data and actions, and make them available, in order to enable the effective integration of advanced and adaptive human-machine interfaces, and to make the home system ready for the interaction with upper-level hierarchical entities. Finally, the project foresees integration, prototyping and functional test activities, to experimentally validate the framework and its hardware and software components.