Smart Building Platforms Lack Lighting

There are a wealth of smart building platforms on offer that aim to ingest building data, providing analytics and control on services such as occupancy, air quality and energy. This allows for a more cost-effective, productive, efficient, and sustainable building to be created.

However, at amBX, we have noted that many of these platforms fail to include lighting, or where they do, the lighting control is often unsophisticated and useful data is lacking.

This is often due to issues integrating with lighting systems; historically, they have always been siloed in buildings because of incompatibility and a lack of understanding of the potential lighting holds.

The existing lighting network in a building could be utilised to transport data, facilitating connection. Embedding sensors into light fittings makes sense as lighting is ubiquitous. Various parameters can be monitored; data can be transported to a central source through the existing lighting network. Lighting can be used as a medium facilitating communication throughout the building by utilising a pre-existing, reliable network. It can even react to factors, such as occupancy - turning on when it detects presence but also UV lighting - disinfecting areas when no one is present or supporting other systems such as security or safety.

Lighting integration software can replace some of the costly hardware-heavy solutions on the market. Our protocol-agnostic software, SmartCore, works with various hardware and vendors; it has flexible architecture and future-proofs buildings.

We empower our partners; we’re embedded in Smart Building IoT Platforms and Building Management Systems to add extra functionality such as sophisticated lighting algorithms, technical integration with various protocols, a responsive UI for data visualisation or data aggregation for cloud connectivity.

Our lighting algorithms have been developed over 14 years with academic insight and guidance to ensure it benefits occupants to the maximum extent. Our circadian lighting functionality comes as standard creating an atmosphere that supports occupants, improving their wellbeing and optimising environments for specific tasks leading to improved productivity.

Our research has shown that many smart building platforms are also Master System Integrators (MSIs). Obviously, their focus is on integration and trying to find cost-effective solutions to link everything up. The leading solution that dominates the market is very costly. Our partners have discovered that amBX software can replace this solution from a lighting point of view. This provides MSIs with more choice, and as SmartCore is software, it is updated regularly and ensures future compatibility and connectivity are maintained, whether that’s with new or legacy systems.

We believe that legacy systems should remain in buildings if they’re still operational and relevant. It makes no sense to rip these systems out at a high cost just because of connectivity issues. We help to bridge the gap between old and new empowering building managers allowing them to get the maximum value from their building.

Discover more about SmartCore in this quick introduction video, or learn more about our Lighting Integration Services.   

Do you have a smart building platform? Or are you a System Integrator and want to learn more about how SmartCore could benefit you? Don’t hesitate to get in touch; we’d be more than happy to give you a demo and tell you some more about our architecture.