U4IoT

User Engagement for Large Scale Pilots in the Internet of Things

U4IoT (User Engagement for Large Scale Pilots in the Internet of Things) brought together 9 partners from 5 European countries.
The objectives were to develop toolkit for LSPs end-user engagement and adoption, including online resources, privacy-compliant crowdsourcing tools, guidelines and an innovative privacy game for personal data protection risk assessment and awareness, online training modules.
The partners provided direct support to mobilize end-user engagement with co-creative workshops and meetups, trainings, Living Labs support, and an online pool of experts to address LSPs specific questions.

The project analysed societal, ethical and ecological issues and adoption barriers related to the pilots with end-users and make recommendations for tackling IoT adoption barriers, including educational needs and sustainability models for LSPs and future IoT pilots deployment in Europe.
The activities supported communication, knowledge sharing and dissemination with an online portal and interactive knowledge base gathering the lessons learned, FAQ, tools, solutions and end-user feedbacks.

U4IoT Tools & Support

At a glance

Project:
U4IoT User Engagement for Large Scale Pilots in the Internet of Things

Project coordinator:
Dr Karl Andersson , Lulea Tekniska Universitet, Sweden

Partners from:
Sweden: LuleaTekniska Universitet , Belgium: Interuniversitair Micro-electronica Centrum IMEC VZW, European Network of Living Labs, Netherlands: Stembert Design. Serbia: DunavNET Switzerland: Martel GMBH, Mandat International, Archimede Solutions SARK.

Start Date:
1 January 2017 Duration: 36 months

Total cost:
EUR 1.878,625.00 EC Contribution: EUR 998,625.00

Programme:
H2020-IOT-2016-2017/H2020-IOT-2016

Key Words:
Internet of Things End-User Engagement, IoT Adoption, Living labs

The Challenge

With an expected 50 Billion connected devices by 2020, the Internet of Things (IoT) is reshapeing our environment with great economic opportunities. However, the IoT market evolution depends directly on the end-user adoption. U4IoT supported the Large Scale Pilots (LSPs) of the IoT-1 call in order to actively engage end-users in the large scale pilot design, deployment and assessment. It enabled a citizen-driven process by combining multidisciplinary expertise and complementary mechanisms from the European state-of-the-art. It also analysed societal, ethical and ecological issues related to the pilots in order to develop recommendations for tackling IoT adoption barriers, including educational needs and skill-building. U4IoT combined complementary expertise from leading European partners in end-user engagement through crowdsourcing, Living Labs, co-creative workshops and meet-ups to support end-user engagement in the large scale pilots.

Project Objectives

Project objectives are to support and enable better and more impactful end-user engagement in LSPs. U4IoT provides the pilots with cutting-edge end-user engagement methods, including co-creative workshops, crowdsourcing and Living Labs. It provides online tools and resources for end-user engagement, crowdsourcing and personal data protection. The project provides direct support to the pilots, including training and coaching. A knowledge database enables to collect, mutualise and capitalise on end-user engagement feedbacks and experience. Co-creative and crowdsourcing methods enable the pilots to engage end-users at a very early stage in the process. U4IoT assists LSPs to increase the level of end-user engagement in their whole projects. The set of tools and the community will be maintained beyond the duration of the project with the support of the IoT Forum (Figure U4IoT Overall Concept).

Concept

The main U4IoT concepts were to provide and support LSPs with:

Cutting-edge end-user engagement methods, including co-creative workshops, crowdsourcing & Living Labs.
Online tools and resources for end-user engagement, including crowdsourcing tools, personal data protection tools & online resources.
Direct support for end-user engagement through onsite and online actions, workshops, trainings, coaching and a pool of experts.

Figure U4IoT Overall Concept

The Approach and methodology

The U4IoT approach and methodology was focused to offer different tools and methods both online and in f2f sessions where we inform and teach LSP partners about how to best implement end-user engagement in their pilots:

Develop a toolkit for LSP end-user engagement and adoption, including: online resources and tools for end-user engagement; privacy-compliant crowdsourcing and crowd-sensing tools and surveys to assess end-user acceptance in pilots; online resources and an innovative game for privacy and personal data protection; risk assessment and awareness with guidelines on personal data protection;

Support and mobilise end-user engagement by training and supporting LSPs teams to facilitate co-creative workshops; organise meet-ups and train meet-up animators; training on the use of crowdsourcing and crowd-sensing tools in an efficient and privacy friendly manner, in line with IoT Lab tools; and presenting and facilitating Living Labs support. U4IoT will provide an online pool of experts for end-user engagement; and online training modules.

Analyse societal, ethical and ecological issues related to the pilots with end-users and make recommendations by analysing IoT adoption barriers and making recommendations for tackling IoT adoption barriers, including educational needs and skill-building. It will leverage on end-user interactions to design participatory sustainability models that can be replicated across LSPs and future IoT pilot deployments in Europe.

Support communication, knowledge sharing and dissemination, including: an interactive website, with online tools as well as an online knowledge database with lessons learned, FAQ, solutions and end-user feedbacks. It will support the end-user communication and outreach strategy for LSPs and will enable information sharing and feedback towards LSPs and end-users.

Target Users and their Needs

The target group of U4IoT are LSP partners and the objective of U4IoT was to support LPSs to engage end-users through their whole development processes.

U4IoT encompassed the whole life-cycle of end-user engagement in LSPs. This means that support for end-user engagement from the early stages of need-finding, co-creative design, real world implementations and tests, and exploitation and assessment was offered. This lifecycle encompassed:

End-user engagement in the design phase of LSPs U4IoT provided methods, such as the co-creative workshops, that enabled pilots to involve the local end-users from the very beginning of the project.

End-user engagement in the implementation phase of LSPs U4IoT provided a whole set of tools to proactively engage end-users in the design and implementation of the pilots.

End-user engagement in the exploitation and assessment phase LSPs Privacy-friendly crowdsourcing and survey tools enabled pilots to monitor the end-user perception and acceptance during the implementation phase. It enabled the pilots to identify issues to be addressed in order to maximise the end-user acceptance and satisfaction.