Opportunities for hyperaware smart buildings from EnOcean

Aruba,based in Santa Clara, California, is a leading provider of AI-powered network infrastructure for campus, data center, branch and remote worker applications. Aruba delivers a cloud experience at the edge that can be consumed either as a service in the cloud or on-premises, as a managed service delivered through Aruba partners, or via network as a service through HPE GreenLake.

The EnOcean Alliance is an international association of over 400 leading companies in the building and IT industries founded in 2008. The non-profit organisation is committed to enabling and promoting interoperable, maintenance-free and proven eco-systems based on the wireless EnOcean radio standard (ISO/IEC 14543-3-10/11). The EnOcean Alliance eco-system offers more than 5.000 multi-vendor interoperable sensors enabling data collection for multiple applications, such as room or desk/chair occupancy, temperature and air quality, energy usage and restroom usage.

EnOcean Alliance member IoT devices are the eyes and ears of smart buildings. By securely interfacing those IoT devices with new and existing Aruba Wi-Fi 5 and Wi-Fi 6 Access Points via a plug-in 800/900MHz radio, building control and business applications can become hyperaware of their operating environments. This information can be used to better model cloud-based digital twins, and to optimise human activity monitoring, organisational redesign, augmented reality, human productivity, and occupant health and safety.

Michael R. Tennefoss, Vice President of Strategic Partnerships at Aruba, said: "A building becomes smart by virtue of being instrumented with IoT devices so applications are cognisant of the contextual status of the environment, occupants, energy requirements, service needs, security, and safety.

“The richer the set of available IoT data, the more cognisant and adaptive the building and associated digital twins can become. The goal is to make hyperawareness simple and inexpensive, and that is what the mash up between Aruba and the EnOcean Alliance achieves. An inexpensive 800/900MHz plug-in radio brings existing and new Aruba customers access to thousands of IoT devices, including BACNet and multiple other protocol gateways, and software applications (both local and cloud based.)

“In turn, Alliance members gain access to Aruba’s installed base of education, enterprise, government, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail, and transportation customers.”

Graham Martin, Chairman and CEO of the EnOcean Alliance, added: “Our collaboration opens up exciting new market opportunities for the Alliance members and the Aruba community by combining Aruba’s extensive network power and the flexibility of energy harvesting wireless sensors. The simplicity of the solution makes it now possible for facility, IT and other managers to easily add services, collecting data from ‘peel and stick’ sensors across an entire building without pulling any new cables nor ever having to change a battery.”

The technology behind self-powered IoT sensors

Energy harvesting wireless devices utilise the tiniest amounts of energy from their environment. Kinetic motion, pressure, light, differences in temperature is converted into energy which, in combination with ultra-low power wireless technology, creates maintenance-free sensor solutions for use in smart buildings and the IoT. Founded in 2001, EnOcean is the pioneer of energy harvesting and delivers valuable data for the IoT with its resource-saving technology.

With a simple USB device supporting the EnOcean interoperable wireless standard, Aruba and EnOcean enable the economical, reliable and safe use of energy harvesting sensors over building networks to make buildings smart and sustainable.

“We’re very happy to team up with Aruba to bring the entire eco system of EnOcean solutions to buildings in an easy and secure way,” said Andreas Schneider, CEO of EnOcean.