Building Technologies Coffee Talk: Opportunities for analytics in facilities management

The opportunities for applying analytics in facilities management came under the spotlight during Bosch’s first Building Technologies Coffee Talk which took place via livestream on 14 May. The session covered topics such as the potential of video analytics in building management, the Intelligent Zoning and Intelligent Parking use cases that have been deployed at Bosch in Singapore, and IoT use cases in commercial buildings such as smart toilets and smart lifts.

The discussion underscored Bosch’s transformation from a hardware company into a software, sensor and Internet of Things (IoT) company. As our products become smarter and more IT-enabled - for example, we now have cameras with video analytics and machine learning capabilities – there will be many applications and use cases emerging outside of Bosch’s traditional domains such as security.

Delving deeper into the topic of video analytics, my colleague Adrian Tan (Regional Head, Business Development and Innovations) highlighted the unique capabilities of video cameras as data acquisition devices. He pointed out that cameras are able to capture data such as demographics and human emotions that are otherwise impossible to capture using other sensors.

In video analytics, this data is pumped into a statistical model or algorithm which seeks to discover correlations in order to answer questions or to make predictions. And the model itself is getting smarter all the time through machine learning and deep learning, where it fine-tunes its algorithms as more data is input into the system. This, in turn, helps generate insights that can be applied in business scenarios ranging from operations to marketing and sales. It is important, therefore, for us to start thinking about the possibilities and what kind of use cases might emerge from this.

Solving operational problems

Two use cases were highlighted by Jason Ong (Senior Officer, Regional Business Development) who spoke about the use of video analytics to solve some of the operational problems faced by building owners.

One of these was an Intelligent Zoning solution where a camera is trained to recognise people pushing trolleys. This is to prevent the misuse of passenger lifts to ferry cargo. Another was the Intelligent Parking where intelligent video analytics, running off a regular surveillance camera overlooking an outdoor car park, is able to accurately count the available lots.

IOT use cases

We also had Joseph Chew (IOT Sales, APAC) who spoke about IOT use cases in commercial buildings to facilitate building management. Examples included the use of sensors to track room occupancy, measure indoor air quality, and to detect smell and monitor traffic in smart toilets.

Importantly, these insights have to be delivered through a single dashboard to facilitate action and response. To address this, Bosch has developed a Connected Building solution to link up the IoT subsystem with the building management system.

Joseph also highlighted the use of IOT and analytics in the lift industry, where Bosch’s Lift Manager solution can be applied to facilitate lift servicing and enable predictive maintenance.

The Q&A session

The presentations were followed by a Q&A session which covered a wide range of topics. There were many questions about video analytics and the camera trainer such as its use in enforcing social distancing, the sample size needed to train it, whether it was suitable for fire detection in harsh industry conditions, and how factors such as rain or night could affect the performance of a solution like the Intelligent Car Park. Another topic of interest was the Lift Manager, with participants wanting to know about the accuracy of its predictions and also its suitability for brownfield and greenfield sites.

Post-event feedback on the Coffee Talk session has been positive. Participants found the discussion relevant and useful and appreciated the exchange of questions and viewpoints. This has spurred us to do plan our next Coffee Talk, which will be coming your way soon. Watch for it!