Automated luxury – elevating human comfort and convenience with smart features

Hospitality by its very nature is about providing the perfect experience of effortless comfort and convenience for guests and travellers. And as we shift to a digital society, expectations around ease of functionality and seamless service have increased.

Smart building features, therefore, need to be as much a part of the guest amenities as luxury bath products and superb coffee. While some of these features are visible, such as digital screens for information, wayfinding and the booking of services such as transport, room service or a session in the day spa, others operate invisibly and provide multiple benefits for both guests and building managers.

Smarter spaces for conferences

For example, imagine a conference is being held at a venue. When delegates walk into the boardroom, what they see is the elegant and professional surroundings, décor and refreshments. They quite often don’t realise that behind the scenes there is a significant amount of digital programming that has calibrated the room’s temperature, illumination and fresh air levels to suit the focused and welcoming energy of the start of an event.

In contemporary venues, there is likely to be a smart AV system controlled via touch panel that with one touch of a button can transform the ambience to presentation settings. Automated blinds may draw down, the main AV screen and the projector descends, and lighting levels dim in the audience area. Then when the presenter plugs in the laptop, voila, the slideshow or video automatically begins.

Even the air conditioning settings may subtly change to help the audience feel alert, then at break time, they adjust again along with the lighting to support socialising and networking. All of this happens seamlessly, using Internet of Things (IoT) to enable the networked elements of lighting, air conditioning and AV to respond to the user-defined settings for scenes, activities or scenarios.

Similar approaches are also now being used in luxury homes, premium commercial office boardrooms, and even retail to enhance how humans experience a space and how they behave within in.

Admiring the view without spiking energy use

In the private guest rooms of a hotel, smart building features can also mitigate some instinctive human behaviours. It is human nature when staying in a room with a balcony to step out of the room to take in the view or enjoy the sunshine and leave the doors to the room open. In hot climates such as the Middle East, this then means the air conditioning responds to the hot air entering the room by increasing its cooling output. This creates a spike in energy use, which is both suboptimal from an operational cost perspective and in terms of energy-related carbon emissions.

One of the relatively simple smart building retrofits we have been undertaking for hotel clients in MENA is installing sensors and controls in rooms that automatically detect when balcony doors are opened and prevents air conditioning from increasing the output.

Control systems can also be retrofitted that are linked to the room access card, so if the guest exits while the lights and TV are still on, they are automatically switched off to save power, while the air conditioning switches to a level that maintains optimal temperature without excessive energy use.

IoT and retail environments

In retail, some extremely advanced approaches are emerging, such as continual monitoring of energy, temperature, daylight levels and air quality with sensor inputs linked to the BMS that coordinates all mechanical and electrical systems via IoT to tune system operation precisely to conditions in real-time.

One of the harder to control elements is of course the humans in a retail centre. But we are finding solutions for this also. In one of our recent projects, a large retail mall had within in a major attraction with a small spatial footprint. When there are many people in a small area, the need for cooling increases to mitigate the body heat, but ensuring the BMS was properly tuned for this scenario meant needing data on the flow of people throughout operating hours.

We used the centre’s Wi-Fi metrics as an analytical tool, as they show when people enter the mall and connect to the Wi-Fi, then where they move throughout the building, how long they stay in specific spots, and where the zones are that visitor density is highest. This data can then be used to help program the BMS and the systems connected to it to match conditions throughout the standard day, week or season.

This is a critical part of the smart buildings approach, in fact, to ensure that the BMS and other smart systems are calibrated for local conditions and for user needs. This is a task for an expert in smart building systems, as most electrical subcontractors do not have the analytical and programming skills required.