SmartLivingNEXT at the Smart Country Convention 2023.

Every year, the Smart Country Convention, or SCCON for short, provides a platform for knowledge transfer, networking and the establishment of forward-looking partnerships. SmartLivingNEXT was also on site and demonstrated the added value that a Gaia-X-compliant data room can offer for the smart living domain. Gaia-X enables a federated and secure data infrastructure to share data while maintaining control over data access and usage.

In an interview with Gaia-X Hub Germany, Michael Schidlack, consortium leader of the SmartLivingNEXT lead project, explained how Gaia-X is specifically advancing the smart living domain: “Buildings are currently unique technological entities with different system worlds. This makes overarching digitalization difficult. The aim is to establish Gaia-X-compliant smart living dataspaces on which services and applications can be implemented.” Gaia-X is a key factor in setting the course for a secure, trustworthy smart living ecosystem. “The ForeSight platform project, funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Protection (BMWK), was already about creating a Dataspace Blueprint. In the follow-up project SmartLivingNEXT, we are currently in the process of filling this blueprint with very specific smart living applications.”

The community in the smart living ecosystem will grow to over 100 companies and organizations in 2024. “However, it would be great if even more industry players got involved,” emphasized Schidlack, concluding with the outlook: “A sovereign and European smart living ecosystem can give the entire industry a huge boost to growth.”

The congress trade fair provided a good framework for demonstrating the innovation and research potential of SmartLivingNEXT, and not just for its own domain. “Our vision is to use the smart living domain to create permeability in other domains such as energy, mobility and health, i.e. to enable a large network of compatible solutions.“