Enhancing wellness in smart buildings with PoE technology
Smart buildings connect building-wide digital systems that intelligently communicate data and actions to manage the building’s environment.
Environmental conditions such as temperature, lighting conditions, and indoor air quality can have a significant impact on the productivity and wellbeing of a building’s occupants.
By continually monitoring these factors and responding to them in real time, smart buildings improve the experience of occupants by creating the optimum environment. They also help meet green global building standards such as LEED and NABERS, for which indoor environmental quality is one of the criteria assessed.
How do smart environmental sensors improve health?
Smart sensors enable any intelligent building to precisely measure and control a variety of essential environmental parameters including:
- Occupancy
- Volatile organic compounds (VOC) gases
- Temperature
- Light flicker
- CO2 control
- Occupation noise
- Humidity
Indoor air quality, including factors like VOC gases and CO2, can have detrimental health effects if not controlled carefully. Detectors like the Prysmian Environmental Sensor monitor and regulate these pollutants in real time, ensuring a healthier indoor environment.
The sensor detects elevated levels of CO2, which can cause fatigue, headaches, and reduced cognitive function, and will trigger a notification to change Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) systems to bring in fresh air. Research has found that in high-performing, green certified buildings, occupants achieve 26.4% higher cognitive test scores.
Similarly, the sensor can monitor for VOC gases, which are harmful when inhaled, and will send alerts requesting action to adjust ventilation systems to filter out these pollutants, preventing respiratory issues and improving overall wellbeing.
Thermal comfort is also an important contributor to the wellness of building occupants. When individuals feel comfortable in their environment, they are more likely to experience increased productivity, better focus, and enhanced mood.
Optimal thermal conditions include maintaining appropriate temperature levels and humidity control. This balance not only promotes comfort but also supports the body’s natural processes by reducing stress levels associated with high and low temperatures. Research has shown that inadequate thermal conditions can lead to issues such as fatigue, decreased cognitive function, and in extreme circumstances, even chronic health problems.
Having an intelligent monitoring and response system in place like Digital Building Solutions from Prysmian means that maintaining an ideal thermal environment becomes mostly automatic.
How does lighting affect occupant wellness?
Photometric flicker is the quick and constant change in light intensity, which even when happening at a frequency undetected by the naked eye can have a negative impact on health.
Most lights are powered with alternating current (AC) which is fed into a building from the mains grid. AC is then typically converted to direct current (DC) required for electronic devices like computers.
Most AC powered lighting flickers, albeit unnoticeably. This flickering is caused by the AC which oscillates, repeatedly dimming and brightening the light.
DC powered LEDs are generally flicker-free because DC supplies a continuous flow of electricity, eliminating the fluctuations that cause flicker.
Flickering lighting can lead to visual strain, fatigue, headaches and migraines, and increased stress. Since DC powered LEDs provide a more stable light source, the risk of these symptoms is reduced, and overall visual comfort is improved.
Prysmian Digital Building Solutions enables an internal DC grid with Power over Ethernet (PoE) cables. The offer includes PoE Lighting, which runs on DC power, reducing flicker to provide a healthier internal environment.
How can PoE help buildings achieve LEED and NABERS UK certification?
Power over Ethernet technology delivers both power and data over a single Ethernet cable. It enables the integration of energy-efficient, smart systems that enhance building performance and occupant wellbeing, which are both critical aspects of LEED and NABERS UK certification frameworks.
LEED is a globally recognised certification that provides a framework for healthy, highly efficient, and cost-saving green buildings, which offer environmental, social and governance benefits. From a LEED perspective, PoE contributes to multiple credit categories.
Through facilitating improved indoor environmental quality by enabling advanced lighting and air control systems, PoE directly contributes to enhancing occupant comfort, health, and productivity. This aligns with the Indoor Environmental Quality credit in LEED, which prioritises factors like air quality and thermal comfort. PoE also helps to optimise energy efficiency by enabling real-time responses to reduce unnecessary energy consumption, a critical factor in meeting LEED's Energy and Atmosphere requirements.
NABERS UK measures and rates the actual energy use of offices, helping building owners to accurately track and communicate the energy performance of their buildings. Similar to LEED, this certification emphasises energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality, both of which are significantly improved by PoE-enabled smart systems.
Integrating PoE technology to support a smart building solution is the way forward, not just for building environments, but for their occupants too.
For more information on Prysmian Digital Building Solutions visit https://uk.prysmian.com/markets/digital-solutions/dbs