The Internet of Things (IoT) revolution is providing solutions for industries across the board, from manufacturing to healthcare to energy. It also just might be the means to helping municipalities clean up their acts…literally.
At the recent ITEXPO 2014 event in Las Vegas, TMC’s Rich Tehrani took a moment to sit with John Woodland, director of cloud solutions at Eurotech. The company, which is a full Internet of Things (IoT) provider that offers both hardware and software solutions, took home the award for Best Vertical Implementation at the M2M Evolution Conference Battle of the Platforms at ITEXPO.
The company’s Everyware Cloud M2M/IoT Integration Platform simplifies device and data management by connecting distributed devices over secure and reliable cloud services. Eurotech is headquartered in Amaro, Italy, and its U.S. operations are run out of Columbia, Maryland.
Woodland described to Tehrani the company’s RELIASense product, an enclosed device that “sniffs” air.
“RELIASense is a product we built using our horizontal integration platform as a service,” he said. “We took a bunch of sensors and put them into a metal housing: sensors that measure CO2, radiation, air quality, pollutants, humidity and that type of stuff, and we put a gateway cellular module in that. We created a complete environmental sensor – a weather sensor – that is pole mountable.”
The device, which costs roughly $10,000, replaces previous systems that may have cost companies in the ballpark of $400,000. Municipalities can use the device and mount them anywhere they are needed – Woodland uses buses as an example – to measure air quality all over a city. The company has also seen uptake by manufacturing facilities who want (or need) to prove how green they are. The device can also be used to measure water quality for pollutants and oxygen levels.
Woodland noted that the development of the device started more as a science project to show what Eurotech could do with low-cost sensors across its platform.
“When we got done, we found there was commercial value in this, and that cities are very interested in taking a look at this,” he said. “Now, we’ve got a complete end-to-end product built that people can just take out and hang on a pole or a bus or something and start measuring the quality of their air.”
The device gathers information and reports it over a protocol called MQTT back to Eurotech’s cloud. The company then presents the data to users in whatever format the client prefers through the application layer.
Woodland says it’s a way to remain compliant with environmental rules, but the device could also act as a strong driver to municipalities to clean up the parts of a city that require it most.
Edited by
Maurice Nagle
