Motivation

The Ambient Assisted Living Testbed provides a fully networked residential infrastructure for projects in the field of Ambient Assisted Living. The automation of domestic processes in the form of smart home services can be developed here under real conditions and tested for content, functionality and usability

Goals

Smart home services are no longer science fiction. The growing market for home automation is increasingly offering communication-enabled household appliances and sensors that record occupant behavior and IT services that link these components together. However, the heterogeneity of the technologies and protocols used makes the path to a holistic smart home environment more difficult. The low compatibility between individual services and hardware components prevents the development of complex services that exploit the full potential of a holistic solution.

The Ambient Assisted Living Testbed integrates different technologies. This creates maximum compatibility and flexibility for smart home projects and provides solutions with the following added values:

• Context awareness
• Multimodality
• device-spanning or device-independent realization and
• Personalization.

By providing basic services, the development time of novel service ideas up to marketability is significantly reduced and compatibility with the infrastructure of the Ambient Assisted Living Testbed is guaranteed. The evaluation and further development of projects is supported by documentation of processes and simulation possibilities.

For the development of novel services and their provisioning, the testbed provides a developer framework and the possibility to combine existing services and to evaluate the resulting complex service architectures in terms of functionality, content and usability

Technology

The testbed is equipped with comprehensive household and communication devices and currently consists of

• a KNX bus system in all rooms with light sensors, switching contacts and current measurement for 32 switchable sockets.
• Contact, light and motion sensors with EnOcean technology
• Additional sensors with Z-Wave technology
• Lights controlled by the Philips Hue system
• a BSH kitchen unit completely controlled via IP in a height-adaptive kitchen unit
• a Smart Mirror, which recognizes the person in front of it via camera and displays personalized information
• a ring that can capture multi-finger gestures
• an audio system from Sonos
• a digital curtain with LEDs and capacitive interaction surfaces
• a Smart Meter

In addition to the extensive technological test possibilities, the Ambient Assisted Living Testbed offers the opportunity to evaluate user behavior as a decisive component for the functionality of a smart home service under real conditions. Due to its representative location on the 15th floor of the Telefunken high-rise building at Ernst-Reuter-Platz in Berlin, it is also very well suited for the presentation of research results.