By Paul Davis. Sr. Director, Product Marketing, Atmosic Technologies
Internet of Things (IoT) applications can be found across a variety of industries, making day-to-day processes smarter, more efficient and opening new avenues for innovation and economic growth. Door locks, meters, and lighting are a few of the products driving this transformation along with a host of existing IoT applications that can turn any building into a smart building.
Some smart building applications are geared towards improving sustainability and cutting down on energy costs. IoT platforms can be used to monitor the energy consumption patterns within a building, and analyze the data to produce targeted recommendations for reducing energy use. Sensors can monitor a facility around the clock, providing insight into how and when the facility uses energy. This smart building data can be used to increase efficiency and strategically reduce overall consumption for optimal building operations.
Sensors can also be utilized to monitor the well-being of a building or facility for increased visibility. For example, water leak detectors help notify building owners about early-stage pipe failures and will activate valve shut-down to prevent severe water damage. Additionally, temperature and vibration metrics of critical assets – such as an elevator – can reveal potential or ongoing issues, and flag the need for inspection. When paired with system analytics, sensor inputs on inclination, crack formation and humidity exposure can help monitor the structural integrity of a building.
Door card readers and electronic badges (eBadges) are also used often in smart buildings, along with locationing beacons which can help people navigate indoors. Since a smartphone’s GPS isn’t often capable for indoor navigation, some companies take advantage of indoor locationing beacons based on Bluetooth 5 to send information to a user’s smartphone so they know exactly where they are; this can be very useful in hospitals, corporate campuses, universities and a wide variety of other building types. Another popular use case is automated lighting systems that use sensors to detect movement and turn the lights on or off, saving electricity when a room isn’t occupied.
While these smart applications can help companies to operate more efficiently, many smart devices still require batteries. Imagine thousands or tens of thousands of various edge-connected and battery-powered devices in one large building or warehouse, and you can see how the costs of replacing batteries soon add up quickly and in addition the potential for harmful materials leeching into the environment when batteries are improperly disposed of.
In some cases, exhausted batteries is a minor inconvenience. Take your smart thermostat, for example: if it goes out you no longer can regulate the temperature inside your building. In other cases, however, it could be much more serious – for example, if a carbon monoxide sensor stops working and it’s not able to detect the leak and alert people about the danger. Luckily, during the past few years there have been new technologies that are helping to significantly extend the battery life of connected devices, and even enable some devices to operate without any batteries at all.
Key to this extended battery-life is through a process called energy-harvesting, which is the process of harnessing energy from radio frequency (RF), thermal, kinetic, or photovoltaic cells to power devices. But for the energy harvesting process to work, connected devices must be able to operate with ultra-low power consumption. Lowest Power Radio and On-demand Wake Up are two types of connectivity technologies that dramatically lower power consumption and can allow battery-powered devices to last forever, or allow devices to operate solely through harvested energy.
Energy harvesting and other low-power technologies are especially helpful for sensors that need to be placed in hard-to-reach spots, such as those monitoring for temperature or motion within a building or room. Once a sensor is placed, facility managers will not need to worry about retrieving the device repeatedly to recharge it or replace the batteries. The sensor will work for the lifetime of the device.
Over the past few years, the growing adoption of hybrid work is changing the usage of office spaces. By having sensors that monitor the occupancy and usage of common employee facilities, building managers can configure spaces for better utilization and help to keep people safe.
As office and commercial spaces adopt the latest IoT technologies, we’ll continue to see new opportunities for operating, monitoring, and servicing facilities. With battery-free solutions, such as energy harvesting, these opportunities can be taken to the next level, while encouraging a new era of connectivity in a more sustainable way.
