The Philips Homelab is a permanent fully functional home laboratory. It is built to study people interact with prototypes of technology in a real-world environment. HomeLab, helps better understand the needs of the user and bring better products to market in the quickest possible timeframe. Everything that happens in the lab are observed, recorded and understood. An observation leader and physiologist team closely observe people’s action. It helps researchers find what are comfortable and easy, or difficult and confusing.
The HomeLab has a living, a kitchen, two bedrooms, a bathroom and a study in a two-story building. It has black domes at the ceilings that are hiding cameras and microphones. Signals captured by the cameras can be monitored on any of the four observation stations, which has two monitors and a desktop computer to control the cameras and to mark observed events. The marked events are time-stamped and appended to the video data.
Face Recognition based authentication can be used to detect multiple users in home environment. Webpage based interface is used provided to access the data 2. Mirror can be embedded with various electronic features such as GPS navigation, Bluetooth connectivity, wireless communication that enables voice recognition and hands-free calling 3. Sonus technology can also be added as a medium of interaction between user and system 4. Mirror can also be made touch screen based and modular by dragging and dropping the various plugins needed 8.
