Tom Carroll of JLL property services recently penned an article for the UK-based publication Computing that explores the future of intelligent buildings. As Carroll explains, advanced sensors and the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices, combined with the rapidly burgeoning IoT, will transform the services a building is capable of offering.
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Future smart buildings will adapt and learn
Tom Carroll of JLL property services recently penned an article for the UK-based publication Computing that explores the future of intelligent buildings. As Carroll explains, advanced sensors and the ubiquitous adoption of mobile devices, combined with the rapidly burgeoning IoT, will transform the services a building is capable of offering.
“[This will] optimize energy provision, temperature control, digital wayfinding (using sensors to find deskspace and map surroundings) and, ultimately, deliver a better overall user experience,” wrote Carrol. “[Moreover], the next generation of building management systems (BMS) will function like the building’s operating system, taking in data and making decisions on how to optimize the building’s design and performance.”
In addition, smart building systems will generate, analyze and interpret vast streams of information. This will allow next-gen smart buildings to marry usage data with information about individual staff movements and work habits to help facilitate collaboration between employees.
“By 2030, we predict that the tactical and operational management of workplaces will largely be undertaken by algorithms analyzing millions of data sets,” he stated. “Buildings will be able to link location data with information from corporate databases and social media to engineer interactions between staff members. Offices will soon become part of the management team of any business – for example, notifying one employee working on a project that another specialist is nearby and suggesting a meeting.”
It should be noted that a recent white paper authored by U.S. furniture giant Haworth expressed similar sentiments, as it described how sophisticated sensors deployed in the workplace of the future can help contribute to employee well-being and increased productivity. These smart sensors will be tasked with constantly monitoring environmental conditions as well as the way employee spaces are used. This will enable workspaces to “shape-shift” for maximum efficiency, automatically altering temperature and lighting levels.
“This is an amazing shift in design thinking,” Haworth’s research program manager Mike Bahr elaborated in a statement quoted by Dezeen Magazine. “[We] believe new technologies can make work better by helping people be their best and soon we’ll see employees drawn to the office in their search for increased wellbeing, engagement, and effectiveness. Why? Because their workspace responds to how they work best.”
To be sure, Haworth envisions a workplace of the future where sensor information detailing light intensity and spectrum, sound amplitude and direction, air quality, odor and occupant location and activity are all integrated – feeding critical data to automatic and responsive environmental systems.
“Occupancy sensors that monitor how employees are using a space are already available and give designers the information to create more effective interior layouts. In [the] future they could generate data for a computer system that adapts a space automatically,” Dezeen Magazine explained. “For example, a meeting room might work better as a less formal area without a central boardroom-style table one day, and a video-conference space the next. New advances in sensors that monitor environmental factors like the intensity of light, sound and air quality are also turning these into key tools for better workspaces.”
As we’ve previously discussed on Rambus Press, this is precisely why lensless smart sensors (LSS) are designed to “understand” the movement, presence and patterns of smart office occupants. Indeed, the presence of an individual, the number of occupants and relevant activity are all passively detected with LSS technology.
So, how do Rambus lensless smart sensors work? Well, LSS offers a novel approach to sensing by combining ultra-small diffractive gratings with standard image sensors. Simply put, light passing through the diffractive grating is intelligently spread onto the image sensor below to form an unrecognizable, yet information-rich blob containing the relevant data from a specific scene. This information is combined with application-specific algorithms that can either visually reconstruct a scene, or extract pertinent data, such as the number and location of occupants.
The resulting data is then analyzed – automatically triggering specific systems and functions within a smart building, such as security, heating, cooling and lighting. This smart approach increases the comfort and safety level of the occupants while significantly reducing energy costs. By rethinking the way digital systems ‘see,’ LSS creates an intelligent infrastructure capable of adapting to the ever-changing needs of the individual in the workplace of the future.
With optics approximately the size of a human hair and a power envelope so low that certain applications could run on energy harvested from their environment, Rambus LSS technology offers the potential to positively disrupt the future of smart buildings and cities, as well as wearables, medical equipment, transportation and manufacturing.
Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless smart sensors? You can check out our LSS product page here.
Smart Building Sensors
Lensless Smart Sensor technology takes a novel approach to sensing by combining ultra-small diffractive gratings with standard image sensors. Light passing through the diffractive grating is intelligently spread onto the image sensor below to form an unrecognizable, but information-rich blob that contains all of the pertinent data from the scene. This information is combined with application-specific algorithms that can either visually reconstruct a scene, or extract relevant data, like the number and position of occupants directly from the blob. LSS uses the processed metadata to detect and interpret activity within a space at a size and performance previously unattainable with existing building sensing technologies, all without compromising privacy.
Through the use of diffractive optics, LSS captures information about a building’s occupants while fully preserving their privacy. The presence of someone, the number of people, and general activity can be passively detected, and used to trigger other systems and functions in the building.
LSS can also be deployed with thermal capabilities, so rooms can adjust automatically to the comfort level of occupants. Heating, cooling and lighting can be directed appropriately, and energy can be used only where needed. By rethinking the way digital systems see, LSS creates and intelligent infrastructure that can adapt to the ever-changing needs of a building’s occupants.
To learn more about Rambus Lensless Smart Sensors, click here.
Video: Making buildings smart
Rambus’ lensless smart sensors (LSS) offer a novel approach to sensing by combining ultra-small diffractive gratings with standard image sensors.
Light passing through the diffractive grating is intelligently spread onto the image sensor below to form an unrecognizable, yet information-rich blob containing the relevant data from a particular scene. This information is combined with application-specific algorithms that can either visually reconstruct a scene, or extract pertinent data, such as the number and location of occupants.
With LSS, an inanimate building becomes more than concrete, glass, and furnishings, as it is equipped with intelligent technology capable of understanding the movement, presence, and patterns of its occupants. To be sure, the presence of an individual, the number of occupants and relevant activity are all passively detected.
The resulting data is then analyzed – automatically triggering specific systems and functions within a smart building, such as security, heating, cooling and lighting. This smart approach increases the comfort and safety level of the occupants while significantly reducing energy costs. Simply put, by rethinking the way digital systems ‘see,’ LSS creates an intelligent infrastructure capable of adapting to the ever-changing needs of the individual.
With optics approximately the size of a human hair, and a power envelope so low that certain applications could run on energy harvested from their environment, Rambus LSS technology offers the potential to positively disrupt the future of smart buildings and cities, as well as wearables, medical equipment, transportation and manufacturing.
Interested in learning more about Rambus lensless smart sensors? You can check out our LSS product page here and our article archive here.
Building the IoT with solar-powered smart sensors
As MIT’s Larry Hardesty notes, the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to boast extremely low-power sensors capable of running for months on a single charge using various energy harvesting techniques. Indeed, MIT researchers have designed a power converter chip designed to both power a device and charge a battery that’s more than 80 percent efficient, even at the extremely low and variable power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous iterations, says Hardesty, had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.
Building the IoT with solar-powered smart sensors
As MIT’s Larry Hardesty notes, the rapidly evolving Internet of Things (IoT) is expected to boast extremely low-power sensors capable of running for months on a single charge using various energy harvesting techniques.
Indeed, MIT researchers have designed a power converter chip designed to both power a device and charge a battery that’s more than 80 percent efficient, even at the extremely low and variable power levels characteristic of tiny solar cells. Previous iterations, says Hardesty, had efficiencies of only 40 or 50 percent.
Image Credit: MIT
The new MIT chip also offers additional features, including the ability to directly charge both a battery and a device. All operations share a single inductor, effectively saving on circuit board space.
“We still want to have battery-charging capability, and we still want to provide a regulated output voltage,” explained Dina Reda El-Damak, an MIT graduate student in electrical engineering and computer science and first author on a new paper describing the chip. “We need to regulate the input to extract the maximum power, and we really want to do all these tasks with inductor sharing and see which operational mode is the best. And we want to do it without compromising the performance, at very limited input power levels – 10 nanowatts to 1 microwatt – for the Internet of Things.”
Brett Miwa, who leads a power conversion development project as a fellow at Maxim Integrated, says the current trend is to lower efficiency as the power drops due to a fixed amount of energy.
“[However, El-Damak’s] design is unusually efficient for how low a power level she’s at. One of the things that are most notable about it is that it’s really a fairly complete system. It’s really kind of a full system-on-a chip for power management,” said Miwa. “And that makes it a little more complicated, a little bit larger, and a little bit more comprehensive than some of the other designs that might be reported in the literature. So for her to still achieve these high-performance specs in a much more sophisticated system is also noteworthy.”
Commenting on this, Patrick Gill, a Principal Research Scientist at Rambus, noted that recent advances in energy harvesting technology would help accelerate the development and deployment of next-gen smart sensors.
“Many IoT devices will have a tiny sensor, a tiny battery, and be charged by a photovoltaic with intermittent access to light. El-Damak’s techniques nearly double the efficiency of photovoltaic power harvesting systems, and could make energy-harvesting more practical,” added Gill. “What’s particularly interesting is that as energy management innovations deliver increasing power, the energy needed for sensing, computation and wireless transmission continues to decrease. Since it’s the product of power available times power efficiency that dictates the capability of an autonomous sensing node, we can expect to see a quickly-expanding range of digital interactions in IoT widgets that do not need to be plugged in.”
