Extended Home

Overview

"A home is a place where a person or family lives, perhaps spends much of their time, or where a person is comfortable being. While a house (or other residential dwelling) is often referred to as a home, the concept of "home" is broader than a physical dwelling. Home is often a place of refuge and safety, where worldly cares fade and the things and people that one loves becomes the focus." [Wikipedia 2.1.2007]

What is the Extended Home

We can consider extending the home network by:

Spatial extensions
- taking "home with us" when not at home (e.g., access to home information, remote home control)
- extending the (closed) home network to multiple homes or home-like sites

Functional extensions
- extending the home interface to external services

Our Team

The Extended Home team at Nokia Research Center (NRC) focuses on researching ways of helping to build the connected home ecosystem, understanding user needs at home and innovating new concepts for devices and services which can generate Nokia new business in the home domain.

Our team is based in Finland and is split between two sites, Helsinki and Tampere.

Research Areas

Our work is based on some identified trends & vision for the home domain (.pdf).

We currently have on-going activities on the following areas:

User experience in the home environment
Remote access to home networks
Content sharing
Content protection and DRM
Family communications
Efficient power usage of home devices
Home automation

Technology Developed and Employed

Some of the key technologies, standards and alliances in our area are:

Universal Plug-n-Play (UPnP)
Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA)
Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF)

Publications / Presentations / Standards

You can find a list of our publications and presentations here.

Collaborations

Currently on-going external collaborations:

Participating in the Steering Committee of the InHoNets project
Participating in the Industry Advisory Board of the IST CONTENT Network of Excellence

Past external collaborations/activities:

2005-2007: Participation in the Steering Committee of the Delco (P2P and Datacast Hybrid Delivery System) project
2004-2006: Participation in the Celtic EnComPAs project
2003-2004: Participation in the Steering Committee of the MAD (Datacast and the FLUTE protocol reference implementation) project
2002-2004: Participation in the IST Future Home project

Team People

Team leader:
Seamus Moloney

Team members:

Jukka Alve - Content Protection & DRM
Petros Belimpasakis - Content Sharing & Remote Access
Mihaly Börzsei - Content Sharing & Interoperability
Martinpeter Michael - RFID, Home Services
Alexander Kanavin - Remote Access
Mia Lähteenmäki - User Experience
Lauri Laitinen - Aware home, Assisted living
Pekka Luoma - Content Sharing & User Studies
Olli Rantapuska - Remote Access & Home User Interfaces
Santtu Naukkarinen - Internet services, Embedded SW/HW
Antti Virolainen - Home Device Management & Power Saving at Home

Future Possibilities

Some future directions for our research work:

Concept home devices
Hybrid Physical/Digital presence
Enhanced family togetherness
Aware home

Links