Mirror, mirror on the wall, which is the smartest of them all? LEGaTO’s smart mirror is presented at Hannover Fair Trade 2019

On 1-5 April, the LEGaTO project was presented at the Hannover Messe 2019, one of the largest trade fairs around the world with 6,500 exhibitors and over 200,000 visitors. Bielefeld University (UNIBI) organised the booth and presented LEGaTO and other advanced technologies along with the Research Institute for Cognition and Robotics (CoR Lab) and the Cluster of Excellence Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC) at the event in Hannover, Germany. LEGaTO’s smart mirror technology was one of the projects on display, attracting considerable interest from visitors at this international leading industrial show.

As part of LEGaTO, UNIBI’s Cognitronics and Sensor Systems Research Group has developed a smart home mirror that offers advanced applications with low-power computing technology. Jens Hagemeyer and Nils Kucza, both researchers at UNIBI, were present at Bielefeld’s booth at the Hannover fair to showcase the intelligent mirror. “We were very happy to welcome a great number of people interested in learning about our smart mirror to the booth. We offered demonstrations of the mirror to the visitors who were eager to see how it interacts with the user and to hear about its ability to work using less energy,” says Jens.

Smart home products typically use high levels of power using cloud computing. UNIBI’s smart mirror demonstrates how, with LEGaTO’s machine learning methods, smart living environments can function on lower amounts of energy. The mirror recognises the user’s gestures and speech and displays personalised information that is useful for the user, such as public transport schedules and data about the current situation of the house. At the same time, privacy is protected as the data is processed locally and not in external corporate servers.

“Presenting LEGaTO’s technology at Hannover Messe has been a significant opportunity to showcase our research to a wider audience and interact with people from research, industry, and the general public”, stated Nils. The Hannover Messe is considered an international leading industrial show where all key technologies of industrial pioneers can be found. Visitors have the opportunity to see more than 500 use cases from 6,500 exhibitors from 75 countries, and attend more than 80 forums and conferences with key technologies and core areas of industry in one place.

LEGaTO and UNIBI

UNIBI is one of LEGaTO’s participants and applies the project outcomes in the domains of energy-efficient computing, reconfigurable hardware and IoT applications. UNIBI experts are utilising the developed systems and methodologies of LEGaTO within UNIBI’s CITEC as embedded components for in the context of energy-efficient data processing in Internet of Things (IoT) and mobile robots in smart homes. New smart home approaches that use big data to collect information about the user usually consume a lot of energy; however, LEGaTO’s tools bring energy-efficient products into life for a real smart home environment.