Lighting’s Digital Makeover

MIT Technology Review recently published an article about how Lighting and the Internet are merging, and what that means. I found this excerpt to be of particular interest:

“Another look at how lighting systems are changing will emerge this November, when a 14-story regional headquarters for Deloitte, nearing completion in Amsterdam, will be festooned with networked LEDs in each fixture—the first such installation for Philips.

“Each of 6,500 light fixtures will have an IP address and five sensors—all of them wired only to Ethernet cables. (They’ll use “power over Ethernet” technology to deliver the juice to each fixture as well as data.) The fixtures include a light sensor to dim the LEDs during the day, and a motion detector that covers the area directly beneath each light and turns the light off when no one is there. “We expect to spend 70 percent less on light, because systems [give] us much more control,” says Erik Ubels, chief information officer at Deloitte in the Netherlands. Additional sensors in the LED fixtures can monitor temperature, humidity, carbon dioxide, and heat, turning the lights into a kind of building-management system.”

That’s the Internet of Things in action, and an excellent example of how LED luminaires may serve as a “Trojan Horse” for it–a platform for the installation of sensors that make it happen. I’ll be very interested to see how the project turns out. If they publish measurable outcomes, I’ll be sure to share it.

Check out the article here.

Craig DiLouie

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