Platform for Multi-sided Market powered by Internet-of-Things: Opportunities for New Economic & Business Models
About the Project
HAT is a £1.2m multi-disciplinary project funded by the Research Council’s UK Digital Economy Programme. It involves a team of 16 researchers from the domains of Economics, Business, Computing and the Arts across six UK universities of Cambridge, Edinburgh, Nottingham, Surrey, Warwick and the West of England.
Launched in June 2013, HAT will create the first ever Multi-sided Market Technology Platform for the home, allowing individuals to trade their personal data for personalised products and services in the future.
Project Approach
The team will develop the platform by June 2014 through the collection and analysis of data
generated by a group of volunteers (the digital person zeros, DP0s). By collecting this
information from DP0s through the use of sensors on objects in their homes (Internet-of-
Things) and integrating it with other personal data, the project will uncover insights of
unprecedented depth and breadth into how we live our lives in relation to the experience of
things and people around us. The richness of this data will allow the research team to explore dependencies between industries such as medicine, energy and food in terms of home contexts and interactions.
The team will then develop an intelligent layer of algorithms that link disparate variables into meanings-based parameters that new applications can build on to serve the home, facilitating the creation of almost limitless products, services and business models within the home, personalised by individual data. More importantly, the data collected by the HAT is owned by the individual, making the HAT the first ever digital vault of personal data available as a digital asset to trade for future personalised products.
The HAT can also act as a data hub for manufacturers, a platform for the integration of objects data with other interaction data that will enrich the individual’s personal dataset. Industry partners include Dyson, Osram, GlaxoSmithKline, Dropletpay, Sprue Aegis, Strand Hardware, RDM Telematics, 1248 Ltd, Mydex and DCS Europe, and we are currently exploring engagement opportunities with innovative, forward-looking businesses that recognise the huge commercial potential of the H.A.T project that is set to bring together the manufacturing and the Internet sector.
The HAT is an ambitious and potentially transformative research project that has the potential to place the UK at the heart of the next phase of the Internet’s evolution.
Investigator Team
Professor Irene Ng, University of Warwick (Principal Investigator)
Professor Jon Crowcroft, University of Cambridge (Co-Investigator)
Professor Roger Maull, University of Exeter (Co-Investigator)
Professor Tom Rodden, University, University of Nottingham (Co-Investigator)
Professor Glenn Parry, University of the West of England (Co-Investigator)
Professor Kimberley Scharf, University of Warwick (Co-Investigator)
Professor Chris Speed, University of Edinburgh (Co-Investigator)
Program Manager
Peter Ward
