VSS Venture Services Seeheim GmbH

VSS was founded in 2014 with the objective to bring the latest developments of institutional research in AAL and capacitive sensors to the markets. Since then we are building solutions for intelligent living environments.

We integrate off-the-shelf products as Raspberry PIs, Z-Wave and W-LAN sensors with unique capacitive sensors developed together with the Fraunhofer Institut für Graphische Datenverarbeitung IGD. Our systems differentiate from most other smart home solutions in two important aspects. First of all: We do believe that homes have to take care for their people - very much as a car today does for his driver. That means that we have to know about the situation a person is actually in – is the person active or inactive, did she return to bed after a nightly bathroom visit, did she turn off the cooker and stove after leaving and many other critical situations and then take the appropriate action. That could be an emergency call though an individualized list of telephone numbers, we could turn off electrical devices and we could control even the entrance door in case it is necessary. It is not the convenience functions we often find in smart home products as controlling heaters or shutters while sitting in the car or lying on the beach that is in our focus. Our solutions are taking permanently care for the people within their homes acting always in the background.

Secondly we do believe, that all the data we collect are extremely private and therefore have to be stored and analyzed within the private home under full control of the owner. Our concepts and architecture are therefor designed to run on an onside device and only alarm messages or telephone calls are routed through the public network. Privacy is a mandatory part of our solution.

We choose openHAB as our platform because we clearly focus on functionality and the core application while being able to utilize all the convenience and power of a modern open platform.

We are a team of five enthusiastic people with different backgrounds. We are working closely together with our partners in AHS Assisted Home Solutions a company with wide experience in private and institutional rest- and care homes. In 2016 we won projects of over fifty homes to be supported by our solution. In 2017 we will enhance the number of users both in the B2B and B2C markets in Germany and Austria.