Experiences from user centric engineering of Ambient Assisted Living technologies in the Living Lab Schwechat

The municipality of Schwechat has initiated several programmes to boost the ICT research and development as well as the concrete usage of ICT in daily life in order to allow individuals and the local community to participate in the e-society and to gain benefits provided by upcoming ICT. By applying the Living Lab framework, users are involved during the requirement gathering and development processes as early as possible and throughout the whole process. The paper describes the current structure of the Living Lab (LL), the methodologies deployed for user-centred design and development and outlines the experiences gained to date. During the first five years, about ten RTD projects were started in the LL and the first have already been successfully completed. It could be shown that the user-centred approach the set of methodologies available in a Living Lab and the multi stakeholder involvement would be very helpful in designing and developing prototypes (and future products) which actually meet daily living needs.