Building a Lab for Understanding Human Behavior in the Context of Everyday Life at Home

The PlaceLab is a live-in laboratory for the study of ubiquitous computing technologies in the home. The PlaceLab is a real home where the routine activities and interactions of everyday home life can be observed, recorded for later analysis, and experimentally manipulated. Volunteer research participants individually live in the PlaceLab for days or weeks at a time, treating it as a temporary home. Meanwhile, sensing devices integrated into the fabric of the architecture record a detailed description of their activities. The facility generates sensor and observational datasets on typical domestic activity that can be used for research in pervasive computing, preventive healthcare, user interface design, and other fields where domestic contexts impact behavior.

Authors: S. S. Intille, K. Larson, J. Beaudin, E. Munguia Tapia, P. Kaushik, J. Nawyn, and T.J. McLeish, "The PlaceLab: a live-in laboratory for pervasive computing research (Video)," in Proceedings of Pervasive 2005 Video Program, May, 2005.