Smart Buildings

A Sound Smart Building? Hearables in the Built Environment

Phones ring, elevators ding, light switches click, access control systems beep, and alarms blare out. Sound is a very present but little considered form of human-machine interface within our evolving smart buildings. However, recent technological innovations and creative new approaches take us beyond dings and beeps, potentially making “sound” a fresh interface market for smart commercial real estate (CRE). We primarily interact with our buildings on visual and tactile levels, through buttons, touch-screens, and smartphones. The latest advances in video analytics and occupancy tracking mean we also interact with machines, albeit passively, as we move around a facility. “Smart sound” is developing in the home where voice assistants are gaining some traction. However, it still lags behind in CRE, where ambient noise and privacy are more significant concerns. Having every device talking and beeping in the IoT-rich future workplace is likely to have the opposite effect on health and productivity than was intended. Each employee […]

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