Prototypes, products and services

Share data for the common good

The Citizen Science application from Sony Mobile enables the users to contribute to research projects, allowing them to act as remote sensors for all types of data as they go through their daily life. Together with researchers, users can share their data by participating in projects with scientists and industry that can improve society.

One of the main reasons Sony Mobile launched Citizen Science is that they have been approached by many institutional researchers that want Sony to share data with them for research purposes. This application empowers users to work with researchers by being in control of their data directly and collaborating on research that is relevant to their interests.

Håkan Jonsson, a data scientist at Sony Mobile Research, says: “Citizen Science helps us contribute user data to academic research projects by connecting university projects directly with users in a way that scales, by not making Sony a middle man in the data collection and sharing process. Instead, we just facilitate the contact, and the users contribute data directly to the research project. This solves any data liability problems, builds trust, engages users and helps Sony Mobile and our users contribute to science in important areas.”

One example of a project you can contribute to is Social Log, which is run by IOTAP researchers. This project uses call and text history to quantify user tendencies in terms of social behaviour, which is rarely collected on a large scale from a research perspective. The purpose is to enable the development of technology that better adapts to social behaviour.

Citizen Science has been developed by Sony Mobile in collaboration with IOTAP researchers. The Knowledge Foundation partially financed this work through the Internet of Things and People research profile.

Making IoT data actionable

IoT devices create and deliver massive amounts of data that humans are ill-equipped to deal with. What is needed is highly contextualized and personalized information. DocFactory IoT is a platform that makes the data from IoT devices actionable.

Today, everyone is looking for everything to be smart. Terms like a smart watch, smart home, smart building, smart car, and even smart nation are used. IoT technology will play a crucial role in all of these.

DocFactory IoT is based on Sigma Technology’s already existing software platform, DocFactory, which provides middleware-level information integration as well as essential user interface management. It has been revised so that it can now integrate with IoT devices.

Tomas Eriksson, global operations manager at Sigma Technology, says: “IoT devices will create and deliver massive amounts of data which will be used by IoT platforms. Humans however are ill-equipped to deal with the massive amounts of data coming their way. What is needed is highly contextualized and personalized information that is also actionable. By marrying this information with IoT, we will get smarter IoT. We need to intelligently filter just the data and information which is needed and present the results at a level of abstraction that is ready for a human to act upon.”

DocFactory IoT has been developed by Sigma Technology in collaboration with IOTAP researchers. This work was partially financed by the Knowledge Foundation through the Internet of Things and People research profile.

• See live demo of DocFactory IoT
• Read Sigma Technology’s article about DocFactory IoT

A group of researchers and industry partners have for two years been working on a platform that enables you to integrate various technical systems used in buildings and homes. From ventilation and heating to home entertainment systems. This makes it easier for developers to create apps or other services. Malmö University researchers have been leading the work, and the platform is now released under an open-source license.

Integrating many systems into one ecosystem

Today, most buildings have technology that controls ventilation, heating and other systems that make a building energy efficient and comfortable to live in. Facilities, just like modern cars, are controlled by computer systems that ensure that all technical devices work together with the same goals. Many buildings older than five-ten years have not just one but several systems and these systems have previously been hard to integrate, so they collaborate with each other as one ecosystem.

A platform that connects existing building systems

For instance, lighting is commonly separate from heating systems as well as alarm systems, which makes it hard to use smart reasoning such as a window is open in this room, so turning off the heat is a good idea and ‘as the lights are being turned off and it is dark outside, the person leaving the room should be reminded that the window is still left open. The Elis platform has been developed to allow existing building systems to be connected with each other, which makes smarter building services simpler to create.

Any system or device can be integrated

Through the Elis platform, existing technologies and systems already used individually may be integrated into one system, thereby forming an ecosystem that may exchange information through the Elis platform. While the platform is first and foremost intended for energy efficiency, also home entertainment systems or automated pet-feeding devices could be integrated. Through a single (and open source) API, the Elis platform allows services to be developed that build upon what all your systems and devices control.

Rapid prototyping for the smart home

Smart home products and services are often developed using proprietary and closed platforms. This offers stable and secure environments, but can at the same time be a roadblock for rapid prototyping and collaborative creativity. One way of going around the issue is to develop on top of existing platforms and provide a secondary mechanism (based on open standards) for defining and executing services in the smart home.

The Verisure Arduino Shield is such an example that was developed as part of the Smart Home activities together with Verisure, a company providing safety and security solutions for the Smart Home.

The Verisure Arduino Shield makes it possible to connect an ordinary commercially available Arduino board to the Verisure development platform. Once configured it appears as a node among other Verisure nodes in the Verisure Smart Scripting environment. As such it provides means for product, service and interaction designers and other developers to experiment with alternative solutions using a variety of open protocols and standards.

Our developers use the Arduino shield to test new ideas and prototype concepts. Because of the open platform and large community around Arduino, it makes it fun, fast and easy to work with

Johan Zander, senior product manager at Verisure

The development of the Arduino shield was a collaboration between computer science students Andreas Drotth and Soded Al-atia, Verisure, and IOTAP researchers. This work was partially financed by the Knowledge Foundation through the Internet of Things and People research profile.

Context-aware gaming

Making public transport more attractive is an important step to reduce carbon emissions caused by travel. The smartphone game Bus Runner, which is based on beacon technology and open data, is an attempt to make riding the bus more attractive by turning it into a game.

Bus Runner can be played while riding on one of the bus lines in Malmö. The game is context-aware, which in this case means that the content and duration of the game depend on where and how far along the route you are.

As part of the Data Innovation Arena project, bus stops in Malmö along Line 5 (the so-called super buses) and the central station was equipped with beacons that send information to travellers. In Bus Runner, this beacon data is used to determine the player’s location which the game then combines with other context data such as recognized landmarks and styles of buildings, which are then used to dynamically create the game world and obstacles in it.

Using real-world data helped players avoid missing their stop. 

You don’t need to pay attention to two things anymore. You can just look down at the game and you sort of know where you are without even thinking about it.

Contextual data from beacons and other open data sources can thus be used to create services that make using public transport more attractive. Games are one such service but this data could also be used for generating content for other types of infotainment services.

This work was partially financed through Vinnova’s Challenge Driven Innovation program. The Data Innovation Arena project is a collaboration with Skånetrafiken and 20 other actors related to the public transportation sector.

The DynahMat concept entails an infrastructure for sensors that when attached to a food product provide data (such as temperature and geographical position) to a cloud-based information system. The sensor data is then processed by prediction models to estimate the remaining shelf life, which is made available to the supply chain actors, as well as consumers, who can then make more informed decisions about whether to accept or reject a product.

A grand challenge is to create an infrastructure that can be used by all actors in the food supply chain, who often use diverse (and incompatible) sensor and communication solutions. DynahMat thus developed a concept for an open system that enables the integration and interconnection of diverse systems.

Åse Jevinger, one of the project's researchers, says: “With an industry-wide effort based on DynahMat, a new paradigm for the entire food industry could be made possible. It would be built on digitalization and accurate and accessible data, which could reduce food waste and improve efficiency in the food supply chains. If this is done collaboratively among all food chain actors, including the customers, we may help promote a more sustainable food situation.”

Vinnova partially financed this work within the Tvärlivs program. The DynahMat project is a collaboration with Lund University and SP together with 20 actors in the food supply chain, and a number of ICT companies.

How the Mesh Presenter works

At the beginning of a meeting, people join the mesh network by tapping their phones together. They can now use their own devices to share images with the person in charge of the meeting, who decides if the new slide should appear on all devices, including the projector. By using mesh technology, the application can be used without having access to WiFi or 3G/4G/LTE.

The system was developed by interaction design master’s student Felipe Erias Morandeira in collaboration with IOTAP partner Terranet, a company that delivers mobile telephony and data services via a peer-to-peer mobile mesh network of handsets and light infrastructure.

This demo, developed in the ECOS project, illustrates a scalable Internet of Things-style implementation where the lamp posts handle all the sensing and computation in a distributed fashion. The lamp posts are connected in a ring architecture and communicate only with their neighbours; there is no central server.

One interesting challenge in designing for the Internet of Things is emergent configurations, i.e., temporary assemblies of devices acting as a coherent system from the user’s point of view. The Smart Street Lights prototype demonstrated in the video is an example of such an emergent configuration.

Collaborative learning activities are an essential part of education and are part of many teaching approaches including problem-based learning and project-based learning. However, in open-ended collaborative small group work, evidence of the effectiveness of using these learning activities is hard to find. The PELARS project explores how multimodal learning analytics can generate information about what happens when students are engaged in collaborative, project-based learning activities.

The PELARS project investigates how small groups of learners interact. This by using various sensors that include computer vision, data from the learning objects – in this case, physical-computing components – and the student’s generated content. The system then processes and extracts different aspects of the student's interactions to investigate what features of student group work are good predictors of team success.

Daniel Spikol, one of the researchers in the project, says: ”The need to provide support for collaborative and complex learning activities across all types of education that empower learners and teachers is one way to keep education innovative and meaningful to society. New technologies provide vast educational resources, but to leverage these technologies, the forms of education need to evolve and projects like PELARS offer solutions for helping.”

The PELARS project has received funding from the European Union’s 7th Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstrations (GA No. 619738). The project is a collaboration with several European universities, SMEs, and non-profit organizations.