Keynote: Real-world Applications of Smart Environments in the Home

Bastiaan de Groot (Philips)

Abstract

Examples and future visions of Smart Environments in the home have been around for a long time, but despite our fast advancement in reducing chip cost, power usage and processing power, only a fraction of the envisioned use cases have been realized. This is mainly caused by the high level of integration on a semantic level that is needed to realize many of the use cases and the absence of applications that could justify the investments in a backbone infrastructure for the home. This is currently changing rapidly, with the increasing societal cost of energy and an aging population, there suddenly is the societal need that justifies the installation of the needed infrastructure in the home. With emergence of standards like Zigbee and Continua we are also well on our way to solve the problem of semantic standardization for these domains.

The interesting question that remains is how the end-user and other stakeholders will react to these developments, with the pressure to change mainly being driven by a societal need and not by an end-user insight, these developments are met with great skepticism by the end-users (as we can see with the introduction of for example the smart meter). The major question will be how to involve the end-user in such a way that he will embrace this type of solutions and this is (usually) not the case when the only benefit is financial. Only if the solutions add true value to the lives of the consumers they will fully embrace the solutions developed, something which is often overlooked in many societal driven developments. In this talk an outline will be given of end-user driven developments in this field from the perspective of Philips Research.

Curriculum Vitae

Bastiaan de Groot is a System Designer at Philips Research. Before joining Philips Research he worked for Philips Applied Technologies; realizing first-of-a-kind products for both Philips and non-Philips customers. His focus is on creating new market propositions based on insights from end-user driven research, strategic business objectives and state of the art technologies. He received a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence (Cum Laude) from the University of Amsterdam in 2008, completing his graduation work at Microsoft Research, Cambridge, UK.