Facilities Management (FM) services are an integral element of modern buildings and real estate infrastructures. FM services play a key role in ensuring proper operating conditions for any building towards safeguarding comfort, safety and efficiency.
They deal with a broad range of business processes including building and asset maintenance (e.g. assets’ field service and capacity planning), project management and human resources (e.g. tracking and allocating tasks), as well as emergency management (e.g. ensuring the safety of operations).
In recent years, the advent of the Internet of Things (IoT) is disrupting facilities management processes, making them more intelligent, automated, transparent and cost-effective.
For instance, the integration of sensors and sensor networks within FM processes enables the automated identification of dangerous situations, while at the same time facilitating the discovery and tracking of energy usage patterns. Through such patterns, facilities managers can optimize operating costs and offer the best possible comfort to tenants and employees.
In this context, facilities management processes can also benefit from IoT-enabled visualizations of the status of the infrastructures. An example of these visualizations are Room Temperature Heatmaps.
Read on to find out:
Heatmaps provide graphical representations of data by using a range of colors to represent the density of various parameters. They are among the most common visualizations in data science and analytics.
A popular application is in marketing and advertising, where heatmaps are used to visualize users’ behavior, especially when users interact with web pages (e.g., landing pages or web pages templates). Heatmaps visualize user behavior when using web pages which allows marketers to track different user interaction metrics. These metrics include click tracking, scrolling, mouse tracking, and eye-tracking statistics.
Heatmaps are also used in IoT applications. IoT heatmaps display metrics collected by IoT devices that measure physical quantities like temperature, humidity, light, energy consumption and human activity. Such heatmaps can become very powerful business intelligence tools for many different industrial applications, including facilities management.
Facilities Management heatmaps display information visualized by various sensors such as temperature, energy monitoring and human activity sensors.
In many cases, relevant static or semi-static information can be superimposed over FM cyber-representations to provide powerful visualizations that are used to boost process improvement and optimize FM-related decisions.
Some of the most common uses of heatmaps in facilities management applications are:
From a technical perspective, the development of a heatmap is a straightforward process. It is similar to most data pipelining processes and entails the following steps:
As always, the devil is in the details: Small mistakes in any of the steps can make things go wrong.
For instance, sensor deployment is always challenging as it must ensure that the collected data are credible i.e. resilient to sources of interference that can lead to wrong values and outliers.
Moreover, the placement of the sensors affects the calculations of the heatmap values, as the room or building layout is a critical parameter for deriving heatmap values. Likewise, the data analytics step may involve the comparative testing and evaluation of alternative algorithms, which asks for flexibility in refactoring and redeploying the pipeline of the heatmap.
The Disruptive Technologies (DT) ecosystem offers access to all the technical ingredients of an effective heatmap oriented solution.
Implementing a heatmap in the Disruptive Technologies ecosystem can be fast and effective. The above-listed tools elevate the developers’ productivity and enable them to focus on implementing business logic rather than spending time on interfacing with sensors and streaming their data in the cloud.
Interested in seeing all this in practice? Read our application note on how to implement a temperature heatmap step-by-step.
Erik is the Founder, CFO, and Chief Strategy Officer at Disruptive Technologies. He holds a Master of Science in Microelectronics from The Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Erik has a strong background in the semiconductor industry, architecting the world's lowest power microcontroller at Silicon Labs and the world's fastest-growing industrial, scientific and medical (ISM) band radio integrated circuits (ICs). In 2013, he founded Disruptive Technologies and started the journey to recruit the best people in the industry. He’s always envisioning new disruptive projects, but there are only so many hours in a day.
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