Twenty-one universities from fifteen countries in the world have recently taken part in the Solar Decathlon Middle East event, the Olympics of sustainable architecture whose objective was to design and build the best prototype, in a 1:1 scale, of the future home: smart, focused on design and entirely powered by solar energy, specifically for the benefit of the Middle East region citizens. An Italian team, Team Sapienza of the Sapienza University of Rome, participated in the competition with the project “ReStart4Smart“, accompanied along a path that lasted two years, from important Italian excellences, including ILEVIA.

The edition just ended was held in Dubai during the Dubai Design Week. The 15 prototypes of housing in competition have remained on display at the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park for two weeks. The Solar Decathlon Middle East 2018 was organized under the patronage of His Highness Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Crown Prince of Dubai, with the collaboration of the Dubai Supreme Council of Energy, the Dubai Electricity and Water Authority, and the U.S. Department of Energy.

Together with Microsoft, Vimar, Whirlpool, Knauf, Climaveneta, Forme d’Acqua and many other excellences, each in their own areas of expertise, ILEVIA was chosen by Team Sapienza as a strategic technological partner for the supply of the smart home solution adopted and for the integration services of the project “ReStart4Smart”.

The Team Sapienza has shown to have contributed to this edition with a Solar House of considerable importance obtaining as many as 5 third places in the partial rankings (architecture, interior design, sustainable transportation, integration of photovoltaic system, communication) and an important second place in housing functionality. Thanks to the victory of this last important award, the powerful EVE home automation system of ILEVIA used in the project leads to all the operators of the field yet another test to support the technological and innovative height that has always distinguished it.

Amazon’s smart speakers (Amazon Echo, Echo Dot and Amazon Tap) equipped with the Alexa voice assistant technology are also debuting in Italy (currently only available in three other countries) and the home & building automation system EVE Is ready to welcome them. The world’s digital giants, Microsoft, Google, Apple and Amazon, have been competing for a long time to become everyone’s reference for interaction with technology in the home environment, and ilevia follows closely to ensure their own customers an always technologically innovative product.

In addition to accessing the originally integrated services (music play, access to information, news, weather forecasts, and more), the new ability acquired by the EVE home & building automation system gives its users the ability to control their home through simple and intuitive voice commands. EVE customers from the United States, the UK and Germany can now use their voice to control individual devices (lights, thermostats, alarms, and multimedia) or to activate pre-set scenarios by the installer to facilitate daily routines. Using Alexa is easy, just make a request to control your entire world, even through smart watch.

Say, for example, “Alexa, ask EVE to turn on relax” to activate the programmed scene that will lower the lights in the living room, set the thermostat, and turn on the TV on the preset channel – all with a single voice command. Or even, “Alexa, ask EVE to turn off the house” the command can shut down the house by turning off all the lights, lowering the thermostat in night mode, and blocking the doors by triggering the alarm. In short, Alexa will be able to lead EVE doing any action you want, even on individual devices, such as controlling the intensity of a specific light spot.

Technological evolution seems to run very quickly. In particular, the artificial intelligence applied to home automation, the heart of smart homes, is one of the hottest trend of the electronics industry, and that is why we will continue to monitor not only the great digital innovators but also the electronic producers present on the whole world to allow EVE users, and users of EVE-controlled home automation systems (Vimar and BTicino) to access all the technological innovations that our time can offer for a total personalization of their home environment.

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