EU project ePerSpace – Home Networks for personalised services

The new EU project ePerSpace will integrate all your home devices and your network connections to give you the services you want, in the way you want, on the device you want – “personalised”.

The challenge is to provide communication services tailored to people’s particular individual needs seamlessly over a multitude of devices in the home and to reflect your preferences as much as possible when you are outside the home.

The average European home contains an increasing number of intelligent devices: TVs, set-top boxes, stereo systems, VCRs, DVDs, PCs, kitchen equipment, heating systems, power systems and lots more. Wouldn’t it be nice to optimise the use of all these devices in an intelligent way? They could be used to gain access to personalised services inside and outside the home. The new EU project ePerSpace will make this happen.

In February, ePerSpace was launched as an Integrated Project in the IST area of the EU 6th Framework Programme. The project brings together a mix of telecom operators, research institutes, universities and technology providers to create the environment for personalised services at home and everywhere.

The motivation for ePerSpace is that the ability to exchange data and to access external services from home devices is currently very limited. “This severely hampers the effectiveness of personalisation, which, in turn, affects the usability and thus the mass-market adoption of advanced audiovisual, networked services,” explained Pierre-Yves Danet, the ePerSpace project co-ordinator from France Télécom.

ePerSpace will develop innovative, personalised value-added networked services and, in parallel, it aims to increase the user acceptance of these networked audiovisual systems and applications both at home and anywhere else.

ePerSpace will solve existing interoperability problems in personalisation data exchange, services, context adaptation, and management of service platforms and thus will allow the integration of global telecoms networks and home audiovisual and networking equipment.

ePerSpace will develop user adoption and business models focussing on mass-market services enabling seamless cooperation of multimedia user platforms and devices to access personalised services anywhere. Trials and user surveys will be instrumental for that purpose.

All these objectives will be realised through an integrated approach. First, the ePerSpace team will define the services and then specify and develop the necessary technical modules, which will be assembled into demonstrators. The demonstrators will be used for assessing sociological and economical models.