The Hitchiker's Guide to Successful Living Lab Operations

TL;DR

This paper introduces an open-source, scalable living lab platform designed to enhance research on human-building interactions, addressing limitations of existing labs in transparency, scalability, and interoperability.

Contribution

It presents the first open-source, interoperable living lab platform supporting multidisciplinary research and experimental flexibility.

Findings

Developed a comprehensive software stack for living labs.

Enabled qualitative and quantitative experiments.

Facilitated comparison and critique across labs.

Abstract

Living labs have been established across different countries to evaluate how the interaction between humans and buildings can be optimized to improve comfort, health, and energy savings. However, existing living labs can be too project-specific, not scalable, and inflexible for comparison against other labs. Furthermore, the lack of transparency in its software infrastructure inhibits opportunities for critique and reuse, reducing the platform's overall potential. In the face of climate change and global energy shortage, we envision the future of living labs to be open source and scalable to support the integration of different IoTs, subjective measures, human-building interactions, security, and privacy contexts. In this work, we share our living lab software stack and present our experience developing a platform that supports qualitative and quantitative experiments from the ground up. We propose the first open-source interoperable living lab platform for multidisciplinary smart environment research.