The project is billed as a "smart neighborhood" technology test and will monitor energy use inside apartments, as well as the buildings' water and safety systems.
A handful of technology providers teamed with a Scottish housing provider, River Clyde Homes, last month to launch a pilot project for evaluating the use of IoT technology to reduce energy consumption and improve safety at a social housing project that comprises a small neighborhood called Broomhill.
Social housing programs provide homes to residents with low income or disabilities, as well as to the elderly or other individuals who have difficulty finding affordable dwellings. It is similar in some ways to public housing in the United States. Generally, social housing landlords are nonprofit organizations that funnel profits into maintaining existing homes and financing new ones. Social housing complexes are financially regulated by housing authorities, such as the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) in England and the Scottish Housing Regulator (SHR) in Scotland, and partially financially funded by their respective national governments.
Broomhill, which is made up of 666 units, including townhouses, multi- story apartment buildings and three high-rise buildings, is located in Greenock, a town of 45,000 residents, northwest of Glasgow. River Clyde Homes is hoping the Broomhill IoT pilot project will provide a means for it to more easily monitor the community's energy use and safety systems. If it does, the nonprofit may deploy the technology permanently and expand it to more of the 6,000 properties it manages.
Approximately 300 multi-functional IoT devices that are being installed in both occupied and unoccupied dwellings at Broomhill to monitor a wide range of things are used in this project.
Vibration, temperature and humidity sensors are being installed inside elevators with the goal of helping River Clyde Homes better understand their usage patterns and improve their maintenance in order to avoid breakdowns, since both residents and contractors (who are performing work on unoccupied apartments or communal areas regularly) rely on the elevators. Elevator maintenance is a major cost issue for the landlord.
Temperature sensors are being added to communal water tanks in order to ensure the water is stored at safe temperatures—this is being done in an effort to prevent the growth of Legionella bacteria in the water, says Sharon Fleming, a lead associate consultant for business intelligence software provider HouseMark and the architect of the pilot project. Older people and those with respiratory disorders are especially vulnerable to contacting Legionnaires’ disease, so landlords such as River Clyde Homes are concerned about outbreaks.
Positional sensors on communal fire doors will alert staff if the doors have been left ajar for long periods of time.
Inside an unoccupied building, the sensors are being evaluated for public safety uses. "Unoccupied apartments, particularly in the low-rise dwellings are hot-spots for break-ins, [and they are sometimes used] as a route in to other dwellings," says Fleming. The empty units are sometimes vandalized, as well. Motion sensors and ambient noise sensors are being placed strategically in an unoccupied building at Broomhill and will be combined with video surveillance, says Fleming.
Sensors tracking temperature and humidity inside living units could help River Clyde Homes ensure that residents are not keeping their homes too cool or warm, and at a safe humidity level. Fleming says this information could be used to make sure not only that residents are not wasting energy but also that those with disabilities or respiratory illnesses, and the aged, are in a comfortable and healthy living environment.
High-rise social housing dwellings have restrictors on windows that prevent them from being opened fully, as a safety measure. In the past, children have died after falling out of windows with broken or compromised restrictors. Sensors will be placed on select windows at Broomhill to alert staff if the window is opened farther than a functioning restrictor would allow.
Carbon monoxide sensors with integrated cellular modems will also be tested in the pilot. If they detect dangerous CO levels, River Clyde Homes maintenance staff will receive SMS alerts on their mobile phones. Each detector also runs diagnostic tests each week and triggers alerts via SMS if the device is not functioning properly or its battery is low.
With the exception of the CO sensor, all of the sensor modules contain Sigfox radios. Sigfox is a networking provider that has developed a protocol for transmitting small packets of data over sub-GHz frequencies, on ISM bands (868 MHz in Europe and 902 MHz in the US) using ultra-narrow band (UNB) modulation. The data from the sensors is transmitted to a Sigfox base station, which has been installed on the roof of one of the high-rise blocks in the Broomhill neighborhood. The radios have a range of around 2.5 miles in urban environments. From the base station, the data will be transmitted across the Sigfox network in Greenock, which was deployed through a partnership with British telecommunications firm Arqiva.
IoT platform provider Flexeye is working with HouseMark to deliver the analytics, dashboards, visualization and reporting tools that are being used to collect and manage the sensor data.
Flexeye is also the leader of a consortium of companies developing Hypercat, a specification designed to support interoperability between Internet of Things services and applications. Hypercat has established a common language for resources—using a format called uniform resource identifiers (URI)—that are referenced in multiple systems that may have dissimilar data structures, but which all use the hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP). Hypercat employs the JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) data interchange format and RESTful application programming interfaces (APIs). The data collected through this pilot project will be shared among the stakeholders using the Hypercat format.
Fleming says that all 300 sensors should be installed by the end of this month, and the pilot project will then run for six months, after which River Clyde Homes will decide whether to keep the sensor network deployed or remove it. She adds that if the River Clyde Homes decides to keep the network in place or expand its use to other properties, it will need to work with the technology vendors to establish some sort of payment arrangement, such as a subscription service.
Aside from monitoring the reliability and safety of different physical assets such as elevators, doors and windows, Fleming says that River Clyde Homes hopes the IoT project will enable it "to identify opportunities to improve services for its tenants as well as to reduce costs through proactive maintenance of buildings and equipment." The data may eventually be shared with insurance providers, as well, and be used to negotiate premiums.
No comments:
Post a Comment