Smart Home Technologie

© gettyimages.de/Oscar Wong

Today, the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action is launching the funding call for the new technology programme "SmartLivingNEXT - Artificial Intelligence for Sustainable Living and Residential Environments". The programme focuses on intelligent, digital services and products for everyday living and home environments that facilitate everyday mobility and support healthy and independent living. The programme offers funding of around €25 million - subject to available budget funds.

Parliamentary State Secretary Franziska Brantner said: "SmartLiving technologies have great potential to contribute to more sustainability in living and home environments. We want to use SmartLivingNext to tap this potential, and are therefore focusing on energy saving, health prevention, social care and security. We want to become the lead market for sustainable Smart Living technologies and applications and at the same time strengthen digital sovereignty. This is a unique opportunity for developers, manufacturers and providers to establish important unique selling points when competing internationally. The willingness to share one's own data is a prerequisite for market success. Complex, AI-based services that do not yet exist in this form can only be realised in this way. With SmartLivingNEXT, we are creating the necessary foundation for German and European manufacturers and providers to benefit from this future market."

Smart living applications can in particular help to save energy. A well-known example are software applications that ensure the automatic lowering of heating temperatures depending on the weather or when residents are absent.

The aim of SmartLivingNEXT is to create a universal, AI-based ecosystem for the development of intelligent and sustainability-oriented digital services and applications.

The development in the markets for smart living applications has gained significant momentum in recent years. For the period 2017 to 2025, a 23% increase of average annual sales is expected worldwide. By 2025, approximately 97 million households in Europe alone, and thus almost half of all households, will be using digital smart living applications. Global sales from smart living are expected to reach €180 billion in 2025. The hot spots are Europe, the US, China, Japan and South Korea. In Germany alone, a market volume of over €9.6 billion is forecast for 2025, an increase of 50% compared to 2021.

SmartLivingNEXT builds on existing results, using in particular the platform project "ForeSight - platform for context-sensitive, intelligent and predictive smart living services". It also takes into account basic concepts of GAIA-X for trustworthy data sharing.

Further information

Call for funding and application: https://www.digitale-technologien.de/DT/Navigation/DE/Foerderaufrufe/smart_living_next/smart_living_next.html

Applications can be submitted until noon on 6 March 2023.