Consumer Empowerment and Participation in the Domain of Smart Living (COMET)

COMET stands for Consumer Empowerment and Participation in the Domain of Smart Living. The consortium project COMET aims to address a central challenge of digital ecosystems: data availability. For this purpose, several partners from research and industry have been working together within the consortium project since 2023. Currently, COMET involves, besides the Goethe University, the German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence (DFKI), the Society for Residential and Housing Construction Baden-Württemberg mbH (GSW), and the mediola - connected living AG (mediola). From the Goethe University, Dr. K. Valerie Carl is involved in the project. COMET is also part of the larger funding call “SmartLivingNEXT” based on the “Development of Digital Technologies” funding program of the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action (BMWK) and works closely with the lead project and various satellite projects within this framework.

The overarching goal of COMET is to enrich a digital Smart Living ecosystem with real consumer data. For one, COMET develops and implements mechanisms of Consumer Empowerment, allowing consumers to autonomously decide which data they want to provide and how it should be used. This active participation of consumers enables them to give informed consent to the use of data while simultaneously exercising their digital sovereignty. Consumers will thus be able to participate in the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem as Data Owners in the future, voluntarily providing their data. This is intended to facilitate the availability of data in the SmartLivingNEXT Data Space and responsibly open access to real consumer data for participating companies.

The creation of an open and accessible ecosystem, in which consumers can act as Data Owners, also offers various potentials for companies. Companies gain access to a wealth of data that can be used to develop innovative AI-based offerings. COMET aims to enable or incentivize consumers to label data, thereby making particularly valuable data accessible for the training of AI-based systems in the SmartLivingNEXT ecosystem.

Within the framework of the project, responsible, partially AI-based mechanisms for the Connect and Market modules will be developed, and a proprietary crowdsourcing app for consumers will be provided. In this context, COMET draws on approaches from GAIA-X to adequately protect the data sovereignty of consumers.

Learn more about SmartLivingNEXT https://smartlivingnext.de/

LinkedIn of the SmartLivingNEXT funding call https://www.linkedin.com/company/smartlivingnext/