COMET – Consumer Empowerment and Participation in the Smart Living Domain

Challenge and innovation

Users already collect their data in a large number of applications and services in connection with smart living. They are currently primarily available to themselves and large manufacturers of smart living products and cannot be fully and responsibly exploited due to a lack of connectivity and trust regarding the use of their data. This monopolization of smart living data means that small and medium-sized companies in Germany and Europe in particular are at a competitive disadvantage, as the lack of data makes it difficult for them to develop new AI-based services to solve pressing challenges such as the increasing demand for resources and energy.

The COMET project aims to use the COMET Connect and COMET Personal Data Market modules to give users more control as data owners and thus also enable companies to access high-quality data for AI-based innovations. COMET is intended to enable private end users to initially participate in the SmartLivingNEXT dataspace and thus increase its attractiveness and scope.

With the help of COMET Connect, users can share data for the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem (in whole or in part). COMET Connect ensures that the individual data formats of the manufacturer data are provided interoperably, thereby ensuring greater data availability. It is used to integrate various applications and applications across manufacturer boundaries and thus represents the interface to users of various applications for the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem.

In addition to integrating existing applications regardless of the manufacturer, COMET is also developing its own crowdsourcing app. It creates an innovative solution that enables users to provide their data in the area of smart living while maintaining transparency and control over its use. The app enables users to collect data from their home by entering it manually and to make this data available to the data ecosystem on a voluntary basis. The combination of consumption data and self-reported data creates labeled data that is of great importance for the development of AI-based services.

The COMET Personal Data Market is a transparent and innovative solution in which users retain control over their own data and can decide for themselves with whom they want to share their data (data ownership). Through various services such as The Data Catalogue, a Consent Registry or a Data Quality Computation Service enable consumers to collect, manage and provide their data in a targeted manner. At the same time, the services ensure adequate quality and ease of processing for ecosystem participants.

Application and benefits

COMET Connect and the COMET Personal Data Market will be further developed and established in close cooperation with the SmartLivingNEXT flagship project. The platform provided by the flagship project will be used as a technical and conceptual basis. Initially, the systems of the application partners will be connected. It is already possible to connect the flagship project as well as the satellites and participating companies during the project phase. As part of the project, but also beyond its duration, COMET Connect and thus also the COMET Personal Data Market will be made available to other companies in the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem, so that the overall goal of a more attractive data space can be pursued.

Advantages of COMET

Without COMET	With COMET
Data from smart living manufacturers is not widely available to small and medium-sized enterprises and cannot be used by service application developers.	The COMET Personal Data Market provides the interface to developers. It provides data that can be used to develop completely new AI applications.
So far, consumers have only received partial added value for providing their data.	By developing intelligent services, consumers receive something in return for providing their data, in particular in the form of a statistical service to be developed to improve quality of life and economic efficiency.
No or little transparency and freedom of choice regarding data transfer and data use for consumers.	The COMET Data Usage Analyzer enables traceable data release. The COMET Consent Registry ensures the data sovereignty of consumers.
Data in different formats makes reusability more difficult. Heterogeneous databases cannot be combined with each other.	Data in the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem is interoperable and can be used across manufacturers to develop services. By using the SmartLivingNEXT data space, the data offered by COMET is interoperable.
The SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem currently still has little data.	COMET provides the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem with data from real operations while the project is still running. This provides impetus for the revitalization of the ecosystem. Thanks to Comet, a lot of data from various application scenarios is already available in the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem for the development of AI-based services during the project.