About us
The Lemanic Living Lab is a network of expertise, geographically anchored in Pully, in the canton of Vaud, Switzerland, offering its capacities of evaluation, advice and pilot experimentation for all innovative products, services and environments likely to enhance well-being or establish a healthier relationship among and with living beings. These services concern as well the identification, acquisition, co-design as the implementation of the new solutions envisaged and which can benefit from the indications and orientations of the Lemanic Living Lab.
A living lab is a human environment designed for exploring, experimenting, evaluating and co-creating innovative products and services by integrating potential users of these solutions, whether intermediate or end users, in these processes. This approach, valuing as key criteria the various aspects of the "user" experience, aims to obtain essential indications on the innovative solutions’ usefulness, acceptability and range of progression in order to bring more capabilities and options to future users (empowerment).
The Lemanic Living Lab is based on more than thirty years of expert experience. In order to accomplish its mission, it calls upon different partners in Switzerland and elsewhere, depending on the needs for particular skills, estimated and adapted from case to case or profiled to take care of specific classes of problems or opportunities.
Its target area of concern is wellness. It is not only a challenge, but also a qualitative space-time to set and configure, where each person, individually or collectively, by socio-professional categories, membership groups or age groups, can act for his, her or their health, quality of life and resilience in relation to critical societal issues.
Working axes
The working axes of the Lemanic Living Lab are part of a general "One Health" rationale where it is postulated that there are strong systemic links between the health of humans, of the of living in general and the one of the planet as a life-providing principle. More specifically, we evaluate or contribute to the co-development of systems and technologies whose objectives are to :
- stimulate and monitor physical, cognitive and social activities aimed at contributing to the well-being of people and their ecosystem;
- provide the necessary accompaniment towards positive stress, along with sensory and emotional co-factors;
- contribute, through games or playful activities, to the improvement of our relationship with the living in general.
In these fields, in addition to the implementation of its own methods of evaluation, creativity, co-design and accompaniment, the Lemanic Living Lab aims at exploring and highlighting the enriching contributions:
- augmented, mixed and virtual reality,
- games and gamified activities,
- connected devices (or Internet of Things), as responsive environment factors,
- smart profiling as the ability to configure a service or product to suit its users.
Methods
Drawing on more than thirty years of experience in TAaaS (Technology Assessment as a Service), trend analysis and weak signals of change, involving the large battery of methodological resources developed within the European AAL Maestro project for connected objects in health, as well as other methods specific to the needs in creativity and design, the Lemanic Living Lab staff and its network of partners, conceive and deploy methods each time adapted to the stakes to be dealt with and the resources available, with several models of how its services can be delivered.
The partners
The main partners of the Lemanic Living Lab (or L3) are on the one hand the Swiss company Inspiring Futures (or IF), which developed and monitors the L3 programme, and on the other hand its first historical partner for the testing of wellness systems, Physioclergere, a physical therapy practice in Pully. Five other partners have been present since the birth of the programme in 2020, namely the Geneva-based health consulting firm Alinoa, the Franche-Comté-based and Bern-based consulting firms DLSIX-Consulting and ThinkNeo, the cooperative Entrée de Jeux in La Chaux-de-Fonds, in the canton of Neuchatel, and the Danish start-up Sensae. In Autumn 2020, the Lemanic Living Lab is in talks with a dozen other partners to complete the pool of skills it needs for its deployment and the services it wants to offer in 2021.