On a chilly but sunny day last week in London—a stone’s throw from the Houses of Parliament, Big Ben, the River Thames, The Shard and the London Eye—I had the opportunity to participate in the Smart Buildings Conference 2014. This event is in its second year and brought together building technology manufacturers, building systems integrators, Big Data experts and technology specialists to review, discuss and share thoughts on the current and future status of smart technology in buildings.
It was a fascinating event, divided into a residential track focusing on smart homes and a commercial track about smart buildings of many types, such as office blocks, hotels, airports, shopping malls and so on. Presentations were interesting and varied and panel discussions proved lively.
It’s been touted as the next big thing for decades, but the smart home sector keeps being held back. Some of the delegates and participants echoed that view, and cited reasons like pricing, proprietary technology, and difficult installations that sometimes require locking into long-term service contracts. However, this is changing with Google, Apple and countless smaller companies introducing new, innovative products for the home at more affordable price points. Users can easily install these next-generation devices and, because of Bluetooth® Smart technology, they work seamlessly together.
The commercial building sector is based largely on a wide variety of proprietary systems and lags behind the residential sector. I heard frequent complaints about systems not working together without extensive (and expensive) integrations and, even then, it was sometimes impossible because of a manufacturer’s private protocols and APIs. I sensed a good deal of frustration and presenters gave the impression this is an industry crying out for standards. Standards that ensure disparate systems—physical access, heating and air conditioning, shading and more—allow intelligent action sequences when triggered by building events. Standards that ensure a consistent and familiar user interface so engineers can use them instantly without a manual. Standards that ensure devices and technologies from a variety of manufacturers simply work together. Bluetooth Smart falls into the last category and its rapid and large-scale adoption shows the benefits a standard can deliver.
I was able to cover beacons and mesh networks in my presentation, “The Smart Choice for Smart Buildings.” Beacons have immense potential in all types of buildings. They’re intended to be an indoor positioning solution but they’re more than that. Typically, beacons interact with a smartphone through an app or some other system allowing the beacon to know far more about the person holding the phone than just their location. Combining personal preferences and behaviour patterns derived from historical data with indoor location data is a powerful mix, offering some remarkable opportunities. Just discovering where people walk and mapping out levels of human traffic against the building layout over a period of time, can hold tremendous value. In large stores, this allows managers to optimize store layouts to drive further sales.
Mesh networks allow large collections of Bluetooth Smart devices—like thousands of smart lights or temperature sensors—to operate in a single, Bluetooth Smart network across a potentially large area. In a mesh network, all devices talk to all other devices in range. A device receiving a message will process it and relay it to all the other devices within range. Each device does exactly the same thing. In this way, messages ripple at high speed right across the network, and to the farthest flung corners of the building. Devices can be grouped and messages addressed solely to that group (e.g. “First Floor Lighting”) or to specific devices. A message may contain a command such as “Light On” or “Light off.” Let’s not forget that all wireless networking technologies have a limited range—mesh networks can address this problem in large buildings. An example of this is CSR’s CSRmesh technology that works on top of Bluetooth Smart (The Bluetooth SIG recently approved the Smart Mesh Working Group to define requirements for smart mesh networking).
I also participated in a panel discussion entitled “The Internet of Things around Smart Buildings.” During the discussion, I asked the audience whether they thought the arrival of exciting new products for the smart home would drive change in the commercial sector too and whether their clients were requesting capabilities which they’d come to enjoy and take for granted in their homes. The answer was a resounding “yes” and that “it’s already happening!”
IHS Technology forecasts growth for the smart home device market to be 56 percent compounded annually through 2018, with 190 million products forecast to ship in that year alone. It seems likely this will influence the commercial sector too, where there is a phenomenal opportunity to not only create new, smart buildings but to retro-fit older ones with smart building technology.