On 6 October, over 120 people attended the SmartHomeNOW Pisa event at the Technological Hub of Navacchio (Pisa) to talk about innovation, integration and partnerships in the smart living industry and smart neighborhoods.
Andrea Di Benedetto, President of the Navacchio Hub, introduced the day as follows:
“We want to make the Technological Hub smarter and more Internet of Things oriented! In addition to renovating the structure, we will make it available for demonstrations and validation of new technologies that improve the quality of life. A ‘smart neighborhood’ model to and a meeting place for technologies, skills and innovation to create much needed solutions!”.
The participants represented all categoriesof the new Internet-of-Things (IoT) market: producers/vendors, service providers, local experts, professionals and business owners, digital experts and startups, researchers and other stakeholders in finance, insurance and media.
The meeting of complementary professional profiles made it possibile to discuss the feasibility of real projects in the local area.
More than twenty presentations during the day dealing with highly relevant topics: digital transformation and IoT (Guanxi), energy efficiency (Esco Italia, Cubit/Enerlife, E-Corner), security (Yale), communication and collaboration (Allnet.Italia, Cisco, Kalliope-PBX, Lifesize), integration and supervision (Domotica Labs, QNAP, Souliss, Thales Italia, Zerynth), care and quality of life and living environments (Nuvap, WinMedical).
Let’s retrace the most important points and proposals made to create the “smart neighborhood” model, which was the focus of this day.
Topics covered and main conclusions
Key word: DIGITIZATION (speech by Guanxi). Today, it is impossibile to innovate and transform products, sales models and organizations without taking the ongoing digital transformation into account.
Connected devices, services replacing products, collaboration rather than competition: companies and organizations that do not consider this evolution (or revolution) risk disappearing within a few years.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY, after so many years of talking about it, the impact on consumers and lifestyles is finally clear: personalization, data on consumption, comfort and personal assistance needs, electric mobility, resource sharing. Today, these aspects must be taken into account in the design of solutions, interfaces and applications – whether we are talking about a single user or an extended community (smart district / neighborhood / city).
ESCO Italia presented the role of the energy saving company, from the initial energy audit and analysis phase, up to the verification of the performance achieved by a building or an entire urban district after improvement efforts (energy efficiency, renewable energy, distributed energy generation).
The Technological Hub of Navacchio has a very important role in this industry which it highlighted during the event. For example, participation in Entropy, a EU funded project that will make it possible to monitor and analyze energy consumption of the campus with the direct participation of the end users: a first “smart neighborhood” use case in which the participants of the event were invited to get involved: local businesses and professionals, service providers and utilities.
The Technological Hub of Navacchio supported Dielectrik’s research and development activities in the creation of E-Corner: a line of products for recharging electric vehicles that can be used in both the public sector (neighborhoods) and the private sector (commercial buildings or residences).
Finally CUBIT, a campus-based consortium partly owned by the Technological Hub of Navacchio, presented verticalePRO, a solution developed together with EnerLife for the accurate monitoring of energy consumption in buildings.
For most end users SECURITY is among the main drivers when taking an interest in technology: protecting people and things, as well as remote control of access to their office or home, are among the main expectations. AssaAbloy YALE presented its security solutions and smart door or gate opening control that makes it possible to use the smartphone. The Technological Hub of Navacchio has already introduced a solution from Sclak, a YALE partner.
COMMUNICATION and COLLABORATION refer to two main types of solutions: platforms for easy communicationwith any connected user device and toos for working smart and effectively. ALLNET.Italia together with Cisco, Kalliope-PBX and Lifesize presented solutions for IP telephony, video communication and flexible (smart) working that can be used to facilitate distributed organizations (offices + residences + staff) such as the Navacchio campus. These are very useful ideas to work better and with more flexabiity, and the event participants were able to evaluate how to offer these solutions to their own clients in the future.
The section dedicated to INTEGRATION and SUPERVISION made it possible to evaluate skills and platforms needed to create building automation solutions both on a small scale (residences, buildings) and on a large scale (connected building and districts), integrating different vendor systems and simple, shared user interfaces. Among the solutions presented were both commercial solutions such as Ikon by DomoticaLabs, enabling integration of devices with standard or proprietary communication interfaces, and open source solutions such as the Souliss framework and the OpenHAB platform.
QNAP demonstrated – in addition to presenting its solutions for storage and data management (NAS) and in collaboration with Souliss – how it is possible to host a third-party home automation supervision system on one’s own devices (for example OpenHAB) and how to create an IoT platform based on a private/hybrid cloud using the architecture QIoT Containers.
Thales Italy showed the state of the art of its platforms for data integration and large-scale services, used to create operational control centers for large districts (e.g. airports, urban public transport, energy districts). Finally, Zerynth, a spin-off company hosted by the Technological Hub of Navacchio, showed how to create integrated IoT solutions (from the firmware of sensors to the smartphone user interface) based on its own development system.
The theme of CARE and PERSONAL ASSISTANCE services was introduced by WinMedical (a company besed at the Technological Hub) which presented its platform for wearable and modular monitoring of vital physiological parameters used in both hospitals and private homes.
Nuvap, another company supported by Cubit and based at the Technological Hub of Navacchio, focused on Quality of Living Environments and presented the Nuvap N1 solution, a device for monitoring all the main sources of indoor pollution (up to 27 different parameters). This solution is also available as a service which includes a periodic report, that local businesses can offer to their end customers
M2Tech, a company based in the Navacchio Hub, presented its vision of a “smart village” where even infotainment and quality audio systems can make a difference, using M2Tech interface and streaming products.
Finally, BeeAPP, another Navacchio Hub based company, presented WeNOTE, a location based messaging and reminder system that can make “neighborhoods” more “intelligent” with indoor positioning services (e.g for office locations, canteen and entrance management).
Smart Home NOW Pisa was also part of the 2016 INTERNET FESTIVAL (Pisa, Ottober 6-9 2016).
Hosting PARTNERS
PARTNERS
