6 Technology Quarterly |The Internet of Things The EconomistSeptember 14th 2019
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hen siemens, a big German industrial conglomerate, rebuilt
its offices in the Swiss town of Zug, it did not skimp on the
project’s green credentials. Water from nearby Lake Zug is piped in
and fed through pumps to heat or cool the offices. None of the ma-
terials used in the building came from more than 800km away.
Rain that falls on its grass-covered roof is used to flush the toilets.
It did not skimp on technology, either, for the buildings were
designed partly as a showcase for the firm’s new “Smart Infrastruc-
ture” division. High-tech buildings are one of the most common
uses of the sensors and distributed computing that make up the
iot. gsmaIntelligence, a research firm, forecasts that industrial
uses of the iot will overtake consumer ones by 2023, with smart
corporate buildings leading the way.
Some of the smarts in the Siemens building are there for the
workers. An app called Comfy, made by an American firm called
Building Robotics that Siemens bought for an undisclosed sum
last year, allows workers to adjust temperature and light levels in
their offices with their phones. Over time, the system will learn the
preferences of individual workers, and automatically warm or
cool their offices. The app can also be used to find unoccupied
desks, browse the cafeteria’s lunch menu, book meeting rooms
and flag up any maintenance that might need doing, such as re-
placing a broken monitor.Feeling the heat
Other features are designed for managers. The building is studded
with hundreds of sensors made by another American company,
called Enlighted, which Siemens also bought in 2018. The sensors
are integrated with the building’s light fixtures, which supply
power, and come with a low-resolution infrared camera, a Blu-
etooth networking beacon and sensors to measure energy con-
sumption, air temperature and light levels. Individual sensors can
collaborate with their fellows to establish a wireless network.
Such sensors have all sorts of uses, enthuses Christoph Leitgeb,
the building’s designer. They can keep track of daylight levels,
ramping up the artificial lights on gloomy days and cutting back on
sunny ones. The result, reckons Enlighted, can be a 38% saving in
energy consumption. Building Robotics claims that better lighting
can boost employees’ productivity by 23%. The infrared cameras
can be used to track employees—or at least, the heat given off from
their bodies.
That information can be converted into a heat map of the build-
ing, showing popular areas and less-travelled ones, helping man-
agers make the best use of space. Occupancy data can be fed to the
heating systems, allowing energy savings when the building is
sparsely populated. “It allows us to quantify things that used to be
intangible,” says Mr Leitgeb.
For now, data gathered by sensors in the Siemens building are
anonymous. The cameras see heat blooms, meaning they can re-
cord only numbers and general circulation within a building. But
more personal tracking is possible, says Mr Leitgeb, via the sen-
sors’ Bluetooth beacons, which could track smartphones or build-
ing passes. So far Siemens is not making use of that capability—al-
though discussions with its workers “are ongoing”.
The firm has big ambitions. “Our goal is to have thousands of
buildings like this,” says Peter Löffler, head of innovation at Sie-
mens Smart Infrastructure. There are possibilities beyond simpleTracking productivity
Companies are taking advantage of their new ability to snoop on
their workers—and their customerscontrolled from phones. But, he says, the reality is different. “Pull- From the home to the office
ing out your phone, unlocking it, tapping an app, then using it to
turn the lights on, is much more complicated and annoying than
simply walking across the room and pushing a button”. Voice, he
says, is by far the most convenient user-interface.
Amazon’s Alexa and Google Home, the two firms’ smart-speak-
er products, already have greater market penetration than rival
smart-home hubs. Canalys, a market-research firm, reckons that
78m smart speakers were sold in 2018, more than double the num-
ber in 2017, with Amazon and Google accounting for roughly a
third each, and products from Alibaba, Xiaomi and Baidu, a trio of
Chinese tech giants, making up most of the rest (see chart). Ac-
cording to surveys, around a quarter of American smart-speaker
owners already use them to control at least one other device.
Having a home’s smart gadgets controlled via a central hub sim-
plifies things for consumers. Consumer-goods firms are increas-
ingly keen to ensure that their devices are capable of working with
Google and Amazon’s speakers. Many tech firms have set up certi-
fication programmes, as well as smartphone-style app stores
aimed at third-party developers keen to integrate Alexa and Google
Home with their own products.
The tech firms are chasing two prizes, says Ms Rehak. The first
is that, through a combination of standardisation and conve-
nience, those who master the smart-speaker market will come to
occupy the same dominant position as Google and Apple do in the
smartphone market.
The second is that connected homes offer a rich seam of data to
be mined for consumer preferences. “What these companies are
really good at is making use of data to sell you things you think you
want,” she says. Smart televisions report the programmes their us-
ers are watching. A camera-equipped fridge might reveal useful in-
formation on its owners’ eating habits. Even simple data on when
the lights are on can reveal occupancy patterns, or when a home
owner is awake or asleep. There are already reports of arguments
between smart-device makers and the tech giants over who has ac-
cess to those data, and how much must be collected.
As for consumers, Ms Rehak thinks that many are still ignorant
about the basic trade-off of the smart-home model, in which a ser-
vice is provided in return for “collecting a whole bunch of personal
data”. Even among the cognoscenti, there are differing opinions. “I
love this stuff,” says Mr Wood. “But I have some colleagues who re-
fuse to have any of these things in their houses at all.” 7Get connectedWorldwide smart-speaker shipments,mSources: GSMA Intelligence; CanalysConsumer IoT connections, by type, bn0 20 40 60 8020182017Amazon GoogleAmazon GoogleAlibaba
XiaomiBaidu
Other2016 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25129630Smart
homeFORECASTConsumer
electronics
WearablesSmart
vehiclesOther