Smart monitoring to cover buildings' five-year warranty

The results of the partnership provide a proof of concept that highlights the companies' ability to co-create a future-proof solution for the customer.

The initial brief was to provide a system for monitoring temperature, humidity and external doors remotely in a residential building in Sweden, during the five-year warranty period applicable to all new buildings of this type. Advantech and Trell Technologies engaged with the customer at the very early stages, working with the building owner to identity the most effective way in which to provide a solution that could be scaled up and expanded upon in the future; for example, implementing additional utility monitoring and functionality.

The system Advantech created is completely agnostic to sensor vendor, allowing customers to test various different sensors, resulting in complete flexibility and extensibility for various building types. Temperature and humidity sensing are implemented via Advantech Edge Intelligent gateways which provide a local, private LoRaWAN network and backhaul data over cellular connection to the cloud.

In this project, sensing nodes were also sourced from Third parties providing commercially available consumer grade LoRaWAN sensors, selected by the customer based on aesthetics. All sensors were easily integrated into the hardware system implemented by Advantech. This flexibility was imperative as multiple sensors were connected in each apartment, so maintaining the look and feel of the sensors was as important as functionality.

Door monitors were wired locally, to the physical lock, providing updates on 4 possible statuses; open, closed, locked and unlocked. This information is gathered via an Advantech I/O module that feeds back to the data repository on a state of change basis, removing unnecessary data updates.

This proof of concept implementation uses Advantech’s WISE PaaS cloud platform, however there is no lock-in, and for this specific application there are future plans to migrate to the customer's own Microsoft Azure cloud service. This is possible as the Advantech software blocks can sit anywhere, providing the most suitable solution for the customer based on the individual needs of each project.

“This example of a truly flexible, scalable solution; values that are at the core of what Advantech offers to its customers,” said Bobby Vale, Head of Advantech IoT Platforms and Ecosystem. “We work with our partners to provide the best solution possible for our customers, not Advantech, and this application just highlights how technology can deliver smart buildings that are more efficient and maintainable for the building owner as well as providing peace of mind and a comfortable place to live for residents.”