Description
People own an increasing number of home appliances to make daily life easier, but managing these devices is becoming more challenging. Often, home appliances are left with minimal maintenance, only being repaired or replaced once they break down. In previous Demola projects, we’ve explored the concept of digital twins—typically used in industrial settings—and discovered their potential applicability for personal consumer use. In this project, we aim to delve deeper into using digital twins to manage the lifecycle of the “fleet” of home appliances and machines we rely on every day. This concept is partly enabled/inspired by the EU’s repairability act, which prevents home appliance manufacturers from “monopolizing” the maintenance and repair of their products, opening up the market to smaller repair and maintenance companies.
How might creating digital twins of our home appliances work as a service from the consumer's perspective? What would a digital overview of all your home appliances look like? What new value could repair and maintenance companies offer to consumers, and how could they create new business opportunities at the same time? How can second-hand markets be integrated into the service to better match consumer needs when it’s time to replace appliances?
Join the project to design and demo new service and business models that help us all take better care of the machines and appliances we value!