Building Insight | Air: creating a market ready IoT product in 4 weeks.
As a follow-up on our previous article about our collaboration with Unica Innovation Center, we would like to share with you the story behind the development process of the web application Building Insight | Air, running on the Building Insight Platform of Unica, using Microsoft Azure Cloud technology.
Customer Feedback loop
As a technical service provider in the built environment, creating and maintaining healthy and comfortable indoor environments for their clients was at the core of Unica’s business activities for the past decades. But due to technological developments on sensors and connectivity, having a broad insight on the actual indoor comfort levels became only recently -economically - feasible.
In the beginning of 2020 Unica Innovation Center (UIC) and Heroes started experimenting with an in-house developed web app that provides insights on indoor comfort parameters to building users. It also provided, the possibility to users, to give a score on how they experience each comfort parameter. This feedback loop provides data, that together with the sensor data, is used to continuously optimise indoor comfort conditions.
For the hardware we worked with the bGrid multi sensors to obtain data in regard to a wide spectrum of indoor comfort parameters, such as movement, temperature (IR & Air), light intensity, sound intensity, humidity and CO2 concentration.
And then the pandemic happened…
So we already had some experience with providing real-time insights via a web app on indoor comfort conditions to building users. But now with COVID-19 pandemic the demand regarding insights literally skyrocketed!!!
During the pandemic, researchers came to the conclusion that the chance of transmission via aerosols increased when indoor environments are not ventilated properly. As a result, customers of Unica where asking for a solution to obtain insights on the air quality of their offices, class rooms etc.
To serve customer demand, UIC decided to act fast and start building a product that could help customers in these strange times. Although some functionalities of the Comfort Feedback App could be useful, the installation of the hardware was considered as a significant problem to serve customers in a fast and easy manner. In addition, we also concluded that the web application could be more specific towards the problem we where facing.
Back to the drawing boards
For the development of innovative digital solutions we, at Heroes, normally follow a certain process of exploration, ideation and prototyping. When the prototyping phase is a success, we then take the solution into production by means of Agile and DevOps practices. But in this situation the exploration phase was already defined based on customer demand. So we decided to directly start with the ideation phase.
By means of a Design Thinking workshop the list of requirements and first front-end designs of the solution envisioned, where made in a day. A new IoT product was born: Building Insight | Air.
After that we started making a digital prototype of the solution. This was done in collaboration with the IoT consultancy team of KPN, delivering expertise on hardware sensor selection, connectivity and data pre-processing.
Below a summary of the minimum design requirements the solution had to meet:
Simplicity in installation
- Zero installation pain (no wires or placement of gateways)
- Can be placed everywhere
- No need for permanent electricity supply
- Connectivity everywhere, without the use of wifi networks
Simplicity in use:
- No installation of app
- No privacy sensitive data
- No need for the creating of accounts
Scalable:
- Technically Scalable
- Economically scalable (no initial investment)
- Scalable in new functionalities (after corona)
How it works
Technical architecture
Looking at the list of requirements, KPN advised us to go for a built of a solution using a CO2 sensor that would communicate via the LoRaWAN-network. In order to provide real-time insights on indoor CO2 concentrations, the technical architecture was defined as shown below, where CO2 data transfer is done via push messages from the KPN Things platform to the Building Insight platform.
Web application for building users
Besides only providing insights in the current concentration, the application also provides the possibility to explore past events. In addition users can subscribe to the sensor by submitting their phone number. In case of excessive CO2 concentration the user will receive a text message, warning them about the situation. Below an outline of the web applications for building users.
Voila, a shippable IoT product in 4 weeks…
And there we have it, Building Insight | Air: a shippable IoT product made ready for the market in only 4 weeks time. We, from Heroes, are very proud to be a part of this development and to contribute to a solution that gives outcome in preventing COVID-19 spread.
In case you want to know more about Building Insight | Air, please check out their product website and reference case below.
Endless Possibilities
As mentioned in the ending of our previous article, with the Azure Architecture in place, adding new data-driven applications only gets easier (see article below).
We think that Building Insight | Air is a good example showing that.
We, at Heroes, think it is an awesome IoT product and therefore have installed three sensors at our Heroes office in Utrecht. Better be safe than sorry;-)
Up to the next awesome digital solution….
Since the future is digital, start thinking digital, start acting digital!
- Werner Vink
- iwanttobeahero@heroes.nl
- +31 857 820 449
