What is a Living Lab?

A living lab is defined as "a user-centred open-innovation ecosystem operating in a territorial context, (e.g., city, agglomeration, region) integrating concurrent research and innovation processes within a public-private-people partnership”. A living lab is fundamentally different to a testbed as it seeks to involve all stakeholders as co-creators in the research rather than subjects being tested. This dictates a multi-disciplinary, heterogeneous, user-centred methodology addressing four main activities: co-creation, exploration, experimentation, and evaluation.

As a user-driven open innovation system, Living Labs speed up the innovation process by addressing the user's needs.

What is the CASALA living lab?

Established in 2010, the CASALA Living Lab is centered within County Louth in the North East of Ireland. It forms a unique collaboration between local authorities, healthcare services, Ireland’s first “Age Friendly County”, the Netwell and CASALA research centre’s hosted by Dundalk Institute of Technology and the direct participation of older people themselves.

The Living Lab is managed by CASALA, who actively seeks to collaborate with industry and other research partners in applied research, innovation and commercialisation projects.

The Living Lab maintains an open culture in relation to new and ongoing projects. In so doing, it actively promote benefits gained to a wider ecosystem to enhance the quality of life and well-being of older people and those who care for them, through more integrated community-oriented services, more sustainable home and neighbourhood design, and more age-friendly technologies.

An environment for innovating and validating solutions
for improving the lives of older people.

The CASALA Living Lab provides an array of environments that offer an opportunity, at every stage of the product, service or solution development cycle, to work with older people, carers, engineers, scientists, healthcare professionals and service providers in both realistic test environments and directly in the community. The three primary environments include:

1. Early stage development and testing in a world-class virtual environment and a reconfigurable home-in-a-lab

The Cave Automatic Virtual Environment (CAVE) is an immersive virtual reality system. It offers a multi-person, room-sized, high-resolution 3D video and audio environment. As the user moves within the display boundaries, the correct perspective is displayed in real-time to achieve a fully immersive experience. This can be used to develop and test new architectural, environmental or technological concepts and designs even before they are fully realized.

In addition to the CAVE, this environment also provides a pre-wired reconfigurable model home that can be used for direct investigation of technologies in a full-scale physical environment.

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2. Small-scale deployment and validation in the Great Northern Haven

Great Northern Haven is a purpose-built development of 16 smart apartments constructed specifically for Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) applications.  Fifteen of the apartments are occupied by older residents who are actively involved on research projects and the last apartment is maintained as a demonstration and transitional unit.

Great Northern Haven provides the capability to test products and services within a continuously monitored and validated environment as a stepping-stone for larger deployments.

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3. Medium to large-scale deployment in the community

The CASALA living lab has a large-scale test environment established as part of the existing Netwell and CASALA research base of approximately 100o older people in the community. This interlinks with the Louth Age Friendly County Strategy, which aims to make Louth a hub of excellence for improving the well-being and quality of life of older people. These developments provide a diverse pre-surveyed environment of matched groups for follow up surveys, interviews, and trials that enable insights into adults’ attitudes and behaviours towards all types of technology and services.

YouTube Video: Community based Telehealth Trial

CASALA Living Lab is a member of the European Network of Living Labs (ENoLL).

ENoLL is the international federation of benchmarked Living Labs in Europe and worldwide. Founded in November 2006.  The CASALA Living Lab became a member of ENoLL in May 2011. ENoLL has grown in ‘waves’ and up to the 4th Wave had some 200 Living Labs listed, this has increased with the 5th call for new members having been announced in December 2010, 122 pre-registrations were made and 80 applications were received. The rigorous evaluation process, as carried out in previous waves, resulted in 62 accepted new members to the global network of living labs.

Further information on ENoLL: http://www.openlivinglabs.eu/