Combining User and Context: Living Labs Innovation in Digital Services

With the continuous advances of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) such as Ubiquitous Computing, Mobile Computing and the Internet of Things (IoT), users' living contexts and daily life activities are increasingly digitalized. Based on these developments and other enabling factors, an emerging user- and context-driven open innovation approach called ''Living Lab" has recently gained rising popularity and momentum in both academia and industry. As an emerging and promising innovation approach, many theoretical and empirical insights are needed to understand the dynamics of Living Labs. This thesis focuses on Living Labs innovation in the digital services domain and it addresses three aspects of Living Labs: Concept, Architecture and Methods. The relative paucity of research on Living Labs advocates an exploratory approach that augments the research status quo with qualitative and quantitative empirical insights. The insights are gained from both a literature review and many years of Living Lab practice experiences from several Living Lab project cases in both academia and industry. The first aspect explores the Living Lab concept. A Living Lab concept framework is proposed by studying the key innovation principles of Living Lab and comparing the Living Lab principles with the corresponding Web 2.0 principles. The second aspect deals with the technical architecture of the Living Lab infrastructure. A ubiquitous Living Lab services platform is proposed and implemented by combining social media and the Web of Things. A common Living Lab technical architecture is generalized based on several Living Lab projects implementation experiences. A Web-based two-layered integration technical framework is proposed to integrate heterogeneous smart devices into business processes, and this framework is evaluated in a real-life elderly care case. The third aspect studies the methods used in Living Lab. A Living Lab process model and methods taxonomy are proposed and evaluated. Two case studies by different Living Lab methods are presented. Finally, a comparison of different Living Lab methods is summarized. The three studied Living Lab aspects are not separated from each other but intertwined in the whole Living Lab context for digital services innovation. Overall, this thesis advances a better understanding of the Living Labs innovation paradigm

Bridging the gap between Open and User Innovation? : exploring the value of Living Labs as a means to structure user contribution and manage distributed innovation

In nowadays society, organizations are struggling with the practical implementation of ‘distributed innovation’, or the fact that organizations need to reach outside their boundaries to tap into distributed sources of knowledge to enhance their innovation processes. Within this PhD, we will look at a specific approach, promoted and supported by the European Commission, that tries to facilitate and manage distributed innovation processes through a Public-Private-People partnership with a central role for the end-user: Living Labs. Following Almirall & Wareham (2011) and Leminen et al. (2014), we define Living Labs as an organized approach (as opposed to an ad hoc approach) to innovation consisting of real-life experimentation and active user involvement by means of different methods involving multiple stakeholders, as is implied in the Public-Private-People character of Living Labs. However, there are two main problems associated with these Living Labs. First problem, in terms of Living Lab practice and activity, is that there seem to be too many initiatives, without enough noticeable results or impact. This is linked to the second problem, dealing with Living Labs theory. To this date, there have been a lot of Living Lab publications, but there is no consistency in terms of connection to larger research paradigms and frameworks, and there is a lack of papers with a significant academic impact as well as research clearly illustrating their value. Therefore, from a theoretical perspective, we have investigated both the Open and User Innovation paradigms and demonstrated that Living Labs are an embodiment of both, although there are only few references to these literature streams in the current Living Labs literature. From a practice perspective, we have illustrated that Living Labs are rooted within various European predecessors such as cooperative design, social experiments and ‘digital cities’, but that out of the 345 affiliated members to the European Network of Living Labs, at least 40% is currently inactive. In order to further evolve Living Labs as a concept and to allow a better conceptualization, we developed a three layered model, consisting of a macro level (the Living Lab constellation), the meso level (consisting of a Living Lab innovation project) and the micro level (consisting of the different methodological research steps). Moreover, within a multiple case study analysis of 4 Living Lab constellation, 21 Living Lab innovation projects and 107 methodological research steps, we have been able to demonstrate that the concepts gathered from the Open Innovation literature could be used to analyze the macro level, whereas the concepts from the User Innovation literature could be used on the micro level. Through co-creation, both levels merge on the meso level, resulting in useful contributions to the innovation in development. Therefore, we concluded that Living Labs are able to govern innovation networks and to structure user participation in concrete innovation projects

Ecosystemic Evolution Feeded by Smart Systems

Information Society is advancing along a route of ecosystemic evolution. ICT and Internet advancements, together with the progression of the systemic approach for enhancement and application of Smart Systems, are grounding such an evolution. The needed approach is therefore expected to evolve by increasingly fitting into the basic requirements of a significant general enhancement of human and social well-being, within all spheres of life (public, private, professional). This implies enhancing and exploiting the net-living virtual space, to make it a virtuous beneficial integration of the real-life space. Meanwhile, contextual evolution of smart cities is aiming at strongly empowering that ecosystemic approach by enhancing and diffusing net-living benefits over our own lived territory, while also incisively targeting a new stable socio-economic local development, according to social, ecological, and economic sustainability requirements. This territorial focus matches with a new glocal vision, which enables a more effective diffusion of benefits in terms of well-being, thus moderating the current global vision primarily fed by a global-scale market development view. Basic technological advancements have thus to be pursued at the system-level. They include system architecting for virtualization of functions, data integration and sharing, flexible basic service composition, and end-service personalization viability, for the operation and interoperation of smart systems, supporting effective net-living advancements in all application fields. Increasing and basically mandatory importance must also be increasingly reserved for human–technical and social–technical factors, as well as to the associated need of empowering the cross-disciplinary approach for related research and innovation. The prospected eco-systemic impact also implies a social pro-active participation, as well as coping with possible negative effects of net-living in terms of social exclusion and isolation, which require incisive actions for a conformal socio-cultural development. In this concern, speed, continuity, and expected long-term duration of innovation processes, pushed by basic technological advancements, make ecosystemic requirements stricter. This evolution requires also a new approach, targeting development of the needed basic and vocational education for net-living, which is to be considered as an engine for the development of the related ‘new living know-how’, as well as of the conformal ‘new making know-how’

Participative Urban Health and Healthy Aging in the Age of AI

This open access book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 18th International Conference on String Processing and Information Retrieval, ICOST 2022, held in Paris, France, in June 2022. The 15 full papers and 10 short papers presented in this volume were carefully reviewed and selected from 33 submissions. They cover topics such as design, development, deployment, and evaluation of AI for health, smart urban environments, assistive technologies, chronic disease management, and coaching and health telematics systems

24th Bilateral Student Workshop CTU Prague and HTW Dresden - User Interfaces & Visualization

This technical report publishes the proceedings of the 24th Bilateral Student Workshop CTU Prague and HTW Dresden -User Interfaces & Visualization-, which was held on the 26th November 2021. The workshop offers a possibility for young scientists to present their current research work in the fields of computer graphics, human-computer-interaction, robotics and usability. The works is meant as a platform to bring together researchers from both the Czech Technical University in Prague (CTU) and the University of Applied Sciences Dresden (HTW). The German Academic Exchange Service offers its financial support to allow student participants the bilateral exchange between Prague and Dresden.:1) Robot assisted reminiscence therapy for people with dementia, p.4 2) VENT-CONECT: System for remote monitoring of instruments used in intensive care, p.12 3) Conversational assistant for smart home, p.17 4) Perspectives and challenges of the research project ”SYNC ID” , p.23 5) Music-based emotional biofeedback: the state of the art and challenges, p.26 6) Ambient Assisted Living Lab - Smart Systems and CoCreation, p.30 7) Board Game Playing and Consuming Beverages in VR, p.36 8) An approach to measure and increase the level of participation of people with dementia in cognitive games, p.41 9) Forced perspective illusions and scaling users in VR - state of the art., p.47 10) Training Deep Learning Models for Punctuation Prediction, p.51 11) Towards an Evaluation of Ambiguity in Point-Feature Labelling, p.56 12) The ReZA method goes digital, p.60 13) Haptic interface for spatial audio web player, p.6

The promotion of assets in the community

Espoon keskuksessa toteutetun osallistava budjetointi Mun Idea -hankkeen osatuoto

Sustainable Technology and Elderly Life

The coming years will see an exponential increase in the proportion of elderly people in our society. This accelerated growth brings with it major challenges in relation to the sustainability of the system. There are different aspects where these changes will have a special incidence: health systems and their monitoring; the development of a framework in which the elderly can develop their daily lives satisfactorily; and in the design of intelligent cities adapted to the future sociodemographic profile. The discussion of the challenges faced, together with the current technological evolution, can show possible ways of meeting the challenges. There are different aspects where these changes will have a special incidence: health systems and their monitoring; the development of a framework in which the elderly can develop their daily lives satisfactorily; and in the design of intelligent cities adapted to the future sociodemographic profile. This special issue discusses various ways in which sustainable technologies can be applied to improve the lives of the elderly. Six articles on the subject are featured in this volume. From a systematic review of the literature to the development of gamification and health improvement projects. The articles present suggestive proposals for the improvement of the lives of the elderly. The volume is a resource of interest for the scientific community, since it shows different research gaps in the current state of the art. But it is also a document that can help social policy makers and people working in this domain to planning successful projects

Innovation and the Triple Bottom Line: Investigating Funding Mechanisms and Social Equity Issues of Living Labs for Sustainability

Cities face a host of challenges including urbanisation and climate change and must quickly adapt and integrate sustainability solutions to deal with these challenges. One platform seen as a mechanism to support innovation for sustainability in cities is the concept of the living lab. A living lab is a user-centred, open innovation ecosystem that seeks to engage academia, industry and municipalities along with the community in the processes of co-creation and co-generation of products, processes or services in a real-world context. On-going research seeks to measure the potential of living labs to support innovation for sustainability as they are often regarded as a mechanism to support rapid social and technological transformations. The triple bottom line perspective guides this investigation to examine the environmental, financial and social aspects of living labs. Several methods are used in this study to analyse and triangulate data as it relates to the triple bottom line, namely, literature analysis of 118 living labs, thirteen respondents to a survey of living labs, five semi-structured interviews of funding partners and relevant stakeholders, and geographic information systems (GIS) analysis of living labs in the Netherlands, England and Wales. Living labs for sustainability offer the promise of sustainability transformations in cities; yet, issues plague the viability of living labs as a platform to usher such transitions. The results show that living labs most often engage in projects in the fields of energy efficiency and smart city solutions; yet, they do not communicate the decarbonisation and environmental impacts of their actions. In examining the extent to which the funding regime supports living labs, it is clear that the current funding strategy focuses on the financing of short-term projects as opposed to platforms or processes such as living labs. Consequently, the current funding regime needs to develop mechanisms that support platforms and ecosystems for sustainable innovation that would allow for long-term commitment and trust to be built between living labs and the community. Lastly, while living labs are often embedded in disadvantaged communities, it appears that living labs tend to only engage those willing participants who represent a non-diverse and privileged section of society. This analysis suggests that living labs for sustainability shall seek to engage all people impacted and included in their sustainability purview in the development of sustainability solutions