What is a Living Lab?

With a number of exciting projects lying ahead for 2009 on of the big ones is the official launch of the Athlone "Living Lab". First it is important that you understand what a Living Labs represent.

A Living Lab is a user-centric research methodology for sensing, prototyping, validating and refining complex solutions in multiple and evolving real life contexts. It is a human-centric Research and Development approach to ICT solutions and innovations.

In Wikipedia it defines a Living Lab as a new research paradigm integrating both:
* a user centred multidisciplinary research approach
* a user community driven innovation based on real life experiments
It is intended to:
* increase the understanding of occurring phenomena
* explore and evaluate new ideas, concepts and related ICT artifacts
* confront new ideas, concepts and related ICT artifacts with users' value model
* enable re-usable experiments (i.e. dataset, research protocols and methods,..)
* result in more accurate and reliable products and services
* speed-up concepts to market and promote viral adoption
* contribute to initiate potential lead markets
* contribute to bring science and innovation closer to the citizen


The Drug Advice Support Technology is one of the solutions that emerged from the Athlone Living Lab/ CiT Living Lab late last year. ALL will officially be launched this year and there are a number of exciting projects ahead of us. We will be discussing Living Labs in more detail in later posts.