Hackathon challenges engineers to connect home appliances

Working in cooperation with relayr, a startup company dedicated to furthering the IoT, around 40 software developers were invited to a three-day coding session in Berlin to work on connecting modern home appliances to intelligent sensors, thermostats, weather stations or webcams. An intensive event of this kind is known as a hackathon. "At hackathons, participants are given free rein to experiment and think outside the normal corporate box. Our goal is to be a partner and solution provider for all household tasks rather than "just" a manufacturer", says Mario Pieper, responsible for the digital transition at BSH.

In the digital era, home appliances have to be more than products alone. They need to provide service functions, contribute to simplifying day-to-day life and be tailored to address the precise requirements of consumers. What potential benefits are there in interconnecting our ovens, dishwashers, coffee machines, irons and refrigerators? This is the question the participants were invited to grapple with over the course of three days and so develop new ideas for the household of the future.

At the end of the event, each team had three minutes to present their development results to the jury. In addition to Mario Pieper, the team of jurors was made up of Harald Zapp, CEO of relayr, Sebastian Schoemann from A.T. Kearney, Lisa Lang from Twilio and Francois Girodolle from Nest.

The innovative approaches presented by the teams included an app that enables users to "rent out" their washing machines, and a system that gamifies housework by encouraging people sharing apartments to collect points while performing domestic chores and cleaning up.

The project that impressed the jurors most was called "Blended". The idea behind this project was to utilise a programmed food processor and networked oven to guide users through the process of making a cake. The app created by the team automatically controls all the appliances involved in the process - from mixing the dough right through to sending out invitations to friends once the cake is ready to eat. At a recent BSH event, the winners were presented with a prize of €10,000 and given the opportunity to participate in a BSH mentoring program.