Talk2Lab aims to bring the lab environment into the 21st Century. Smart devices and the use of IoT is becoming increasingly more common in the home but laboratories are still lagging behind in adopting this technology. Talk2Lab currently uses Raspberry Pi’s and Amazon Echo’s to provide a smart laboratory environment where scientists can “talk to the lab”.
We have three main strands of Talk2Lab currently:
- A Raspberry PI / Alexa setup in a Physics Laser Lab at the University of Southampton to allow scientists to query aspects of the lab that are measured by sensors, such as temperature and laser power.
- A visual setup linked with the University of Bournemouth that facilitates displaying different pieces of data taken from sensors in the lab.
- Chemical Health and Safety Assistant that allows users to query potential hazards of their experiments using the Pistoia Alliance Chemical Safety Library.
We are looking to expand Talk2Lab to be a smart lab assistant. The diagram below represents how we would like Talk2Lab to function as a middle layer between ELNs, Data, Instruments, People and Health and Safety data to facilitate a smarter easier to use lab.
