Built at the Supélec campus in Metz, Smartroom is a platform for experimentation. Open to researchers, students and businesses, it allows for developing research to restore the independence of dependent persons.

A strange F3 is being built at the Metz techno pole. Furnished just like a regular apartment, the rooms are also equipped with networks of microphones, cameras, screens, robots, pressure transducers, and fall and presence detectors. Baptized "Smartroom", this 400m² space is the new Supélec research laboratory. There an "intelligent domestic environment" is being created : "The goal is to develop and fine-tune software and material techniques to facilitate maintaining at home persons who are losing their autonomy" specifies Joël Jacquet, teacher-researcher and research and industrial relations delegate at the school. For example, the work undertaken here makes maintaining at-home living possible for the elderly with long-distance follow-up of the chronically ill and the development of man-machine interfaces adapted to the blind, deaf and mobility handicapped.

Smartroom will be divided into 3 distinct spaces. The first, "a deaf room", will have a recording studio. "There we will work on systems generating precise sounds and places in order to allow the non-seeing to move around for example." The second room will be used to "fine-tune new sensors" and in the last one, robots able to "go find a glass of water or distribute medicine." Here, the research is done mainly by the IMS team (see below), but not exclusively. Smartroom also interests researchers at the UMI 2958, the LASC, LORIA and the business world. "It will be open to all those who want to test life-sized material or software equipment being developed within the framework of the applications as well as permitting data acquisition in this area." adds Joël Jacquet.

The engineering school students will also have access to the platform. "As of the 1st year, we students work on projects which are part of the research training approach ." This new equipment will let them imagine and input solutions for the elderly or the handicapped : "an additional motivation" estimates the teacher-researcher.

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