Industrial Presentation

Towards user generated applications on the Internet-of-Things (IoT): Ambient Assistive Living and DiY applications as first proof points

Abstract
The Ambient Media department in Bell Labs (Alcatel-Lucent) is a multidisciplinary team that investigates application trends towards Ambient Intelligence, Assisted Living, Locative Media and Smart Cities that are expected to change the technology and eco-system settings drastically. Our main focus is to enable mass creativity of Internet of things applications by non skilled users in order to achieve an increased value or participation for users, cities or society.

In this talk we will report some first proof points for user generated applications for the Internet-of-Things, highlighting the multidisciplinary.

In the first part of the talk, we will introduce the notion of Internet-of-Thing, and answer some research challenges on what the Internet-of-Things could bring to the user, what are the missing pieces, how user-thing interactions need to be enhanced, and how the user-environment interaction would need to be rethought.

In the second part, we will show how this vision is feasible and illustrate a proof point in an ambient assistive living environment where non-technically skilled people can create & control their own ambient applications: Casensa. Casensa is a context-aware system that can be installed in houses of elderly to support them in everyday life activities. In a tangible way they can define their own smart home by creating the supportive smart behavior of the house and have control over the activation and deactivation of the smart home behavior. Casensa is an adaptive system: when the needs of a person change and s/he needs a new or other support of the system, s/he can in a simple way define new smart supportive behavior. We will illustrate Casensa by a video.


Short Biography

Lieven Trappeniers is leading the Ambient Media Department in Alcatel Lucent Bell Labs, Antwerp, Belgium. He received his PhD degree in Physics at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven in 2000. He then joined the Research and Innovation group at Alcatel in Antwerp where he initially worked on terminal platforms and broadband service selection. Since then, he gradually moved up from the networking layers up to the application and end-user experience layer. In 2002, he became part of the Bell Labs Applications project that focused on next generation of broadband family applications leading to successful product concepts like AmigoTV & MyOwnTV. He is now leading the Ambient Media research department within Bell Labs that focuses on new ways for users to interact with (and create new behavior in) their environment. Previous research of this research department led to the creation of the TouchaTag venture for the Internet-of-Things. Lieven’s current research focuses on user created, DiY, applications in smart environments.