With COVID-19, monitoring indoor climates has never been as important as today. Wether it’s a school or a public place, organisations need to be in control of the air quality. Smart sensors are the ultimate solution to monitor the CO2, temperature, humidity and light to get a picture of the current quality of the environment. Although indoor climate monitoring is well known when it comes to smart buildings, it is not all there is. In this case we’ll discuss some more opportunities for IoT in buildings.
The problem
Smart building is a bit of a buzz word and we would distinguish between two major fields. At first facility management comes to mind, where a building has to be maintained, utility meters have to be checked, security ensured and abuse avoided (e.g. leaving windows open over the weekend etc.)
If we zoom in a little, we find that also the life inside a building is facilitated more smartly. If we think of larger teams sharing conference rooms, open plan offices or resources like printers, a lot of planning and managing has to be done: Establish a meeting room schedule, make sure a workspace is available and ensure that consumables like printing paper is available.
Both fields share that they are traditionally done by staff members or outsourced and that they are mainly simple repetitive tasks which are ready to be automated with some simple IoT features.
The solutions:
A lot of suppliers are offering end-to-end solutions for specific problems while you might want to implement everything in one platform which has all the solutions for your building or you are a service provider and want to scale your specific solution across multiple buildings.
Without wanting to cover every detail, let me outline a few common applications:
Conference room occupancy: Check and manage if a conference room is booked or occupied with a small PIR sensor.
Desk Occupancy: Again a small sensor measures if someone is sitting at a desk or workstation and can inform you in the morning whether your favorite spot is already occupied.
Switches: Magnetic switches can indicate whether a window or door was left open or whether a supply cabinet was opened a few times.
Smart Metering: Read out your electricity meter to manage the buildings energy consumption.
Interested in learning more about implementing IoT solutions in buildings? Get in touch!