An Open Architecture IoT Washroom
How we got there in 4 months
The Greater Toronto Airports Authority (GTAA), the operator of Pearson Airport, Canada’s busiest airport, has an Innovation Lab and, for a few months, I was exploring with them opportunities where our company, Smartwave Technologies, might support with nothing materializing.
Then came the sudden call, “Can your team meet next week?”
They were building two concept washrooms for a washroom revitalization project. Included in the scope were “smart” washroom dispensers for paper towel, toilet roll & soap. Unfortunately, because of an oversight, all they had were standard or “dumb” washroom dispensing equipment. It was August, and the washrooms were supposed to start trials in November. Scrambling for a solution they found:
(a) Market solutions required a paid subscription to a vendor’s ecosystem. You couldn’t purchase a “smart dispenser” on its own; instead, you had to buy the dispenser along with the network, cloud services & consumables. Lastly, there wasn’t a complete dispenser offering; for example, no vendors offered toilet paper monitoring.
(b) There were no off the shelf sensors that could be retrofit on their dispensers to give them the data they wanted.
