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

A web-based two-layered integration framework for smart devices

The explosions of Internet of Things industry have been bringing more and more smart devices (SDs) into business and people's daily life. This creates new opportunities to build applications that better integrate real-time state of the physical world and requires agility for the software to accommodate customers' requirements. Nevertheless, devices are usually provided by different manufacturers, and applications are independently constructed based on their own infrastructures with little interoperability. Web of Things concept has enabled the interoperability between devices by RESTful web service in a light-weight way; however, it make less efforts to discuss how to integrate devices into complex business environment. Service-Oriented Architecture and Business Process Management approach are becoming applicable to embedded real-world devices and provide flexible service composition. However, it is based on WS-* web service specification which is too heavy and complex for devices and not compatible to RESTful style. In such situation, integrating device into business application with simplicity and providing agility composition of service based on device are significant challenges. We propose a web-based two-layered integration framework that enables SD to integrate with each other via light-weight interface and other back-end applications into agile business process. A real-life use case on elderly care is studied in detail based on the framework.Peer reviewe