This post was originally published here
Real World Digital Transformation….achievement unlocked….
Exciting news – We received:
- the Microsoft World Wide Country Partner of the Year for 2016
- runner up in the Microsoft World Wide IoT Partner of the Year 2016
For a cloud based IoT health and safety solution working with Laing O’Rourke (a large multi-national construction company) and working with their R&D division, headed up by Rod Shepherd.
What is it?
We got some great media coverage previously in the early stages of the solution – see here for more details iothub.
Basically Rod & his team had invested 2 years in building SensaMate which is a standard hard hat with a sensor array to monitor workers health and safety.
My team, teamed up to solve the challenge of how do we manage and reliably move this data on mass? Laing O’Rourke had localised solutions and needed help in moving it to the cloud, aggregating, filtering and analysing the data.
We supplied our knowledge and know how in this space through our innovative product IoTCentral that lays a customisable platform for such scenarios that we can rapidly build out these solutions.
The value in the solution is in the analytics – Heat stroke is one of the major concerns working in very hot conditions. The preventative measure of 30 mins of an ice bath treatment is much better than 2 days on a bed in sick bay with a drip for full blown Heat stroke.
Through the data we learnt that 30 mins prior to someone getting heatstroke we know, so that is the best time to take preventative steps.
Figure 1 – The Laing O’Rourke SensaMate hat. It’s important that the additions fit within a standard hat such that the hardware doesn’t need to be re-certified in each country.
The hat seen in Figure 1, communicates back to a base station/gateway (via a ZigBee network in the above model) which is where our smarts sit to ‘cloud it all’ and centrally manage the solution through our IoTCentral Platform.
To give you a quick bit of context on the work conditions….
Here’s a few places that Laing O’Rourke have built….
Figure 2 – Illustrates some of the global locations Laing O’Rourke’s projects from Dubai to London.
When we think of IoT Solutions it’s hard to get a sense of appreciation of the harshness of some of the workplace conditions from the cold in Canada to the heat in central Australia.
Figure 3 – the ‘Red Earth’ of central Australia and a typical site on the right. Each worker is required to have a cooler box.
As you can see, heatstroke is a real concern in these conditions.
Completing the solution we applied our IoTCentral solution to collect, aggregate and analyse the data. There were many challenges in this environment from getting the data out from the site, through to the back end reporting dashboards. (this is the paper back version).
Figure 4 – the solution that we’ve been working on showing all the components using the IoT Suite.
So it’s great to see all our hard work being appreciated through this World Wide Award which makes the 2am mornings and weekend work all that worth while, I’m surrounded by a great team whom are all smarter than me ?
An interesting fact that I’ve noticed with this award is:
- 2012 – won a Microsoft World Wide Partner Award for Application Integration – 2012 – Lookup BreezeTraining
- 2013 – we came runner up in Microsoft World Wide Partner Award for Application Integration – 2013 – BreezeTraining
- 2014 – won a Microsoft World Wide Partner Award for Application Development – 2014 – Breeze
- 2015 – didnt enter as we were merging into MOQdigital
- 2016
- Winner – Microsoft World Wide Country Partner of the Year
- Runner Up – Microsoft World Wide IoT Partner of the Year
So it looks like we have a decent track record at these things. It’s a piece of appreciation for the hard work and effort my team has done, but also seeing people’s lives changed through our solutions.
What’s the secret?
Do what you love and love what you do…. and have fun while you’re doing it.
If you’re not… let’s talk ?