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IndustrySensing a building without issuing anyone anything.
Desk and room utilisation, ventilation that follows real occupancy, and safety monitoring in the places a camera can never go.
What is actually hard here.
Buildings are sized for a peak that stopped happening. Meeting rooms are booked and empty; desks are allocated and unused; ventilation runs to a schedule rather than to occupancy. Every one of those is a cost, and none is visible without measurement.
The measurement is the hard part. Badge data records who entered the building, not who is in the room. Infrared occupancy sensors time out on people sitting still. Cameras answer the question and create a much larger one.
What it looks like on site.
The outputs worth having.
- Desk utilisation — occupied against allocated, including people sitting perfectly still, which is where infrared sensing fails.
- Meeting-room occupancy against booking — the gap between the two is usually the biggest single finding.
- People count per zone — for ventilation rate and for capacity planning.
- Corridor and stair flow — how the building is actually traversed.
- Washroom servicing demand — cleaning triggered by use instead of by a rota.
- Falls and inactivity in assisted living — in bedrooms and bathrooms, with nothing worn.
Why these, and not the others.
mmWave leads and, for most buildings, works alone. It is the only technology here that requires nothing of the occupant — no tag to issue, charge, lose or resent, and no image that anyone has to be reassured about.
It also detects the stationary occupant, which is the specific failure that makes infrared occupancy data untrustworthy for desks and meeting rooms.
Cost scales with rooms rather than area, which makes it the cheapest of the three to pilot: one sensor, one room, one afternoon, a real number by the end of the week.
A sensible order of work.
- Prove it in one roomOne sensor, one room, one afternoon. Enough to see whether the data is what you expected.
- Then one floorOne floor, one sensor type, four weeks. Enough to produce a utilisation figure nobody can argue with.
- Sensor per zoneOne per room or per desk cluster. Coverage does not turn corners, so count rooms rather than square metres.
- Mount and aimCeiling mounting, clear of ducts and metal. Aim decides quality more than specification does.
- Say what is storedCounts and states, not identities. Publish that before the first sensor goes up — it is what makes the rollout uncontroversial.
- Drive somethingFeed the BMS. Occupancy that only produces a report changes nothing.
If it works.
- Space decisions get made from measured utilisation rather than from a booking system.
- Ventilation follows people instead of a timetable.
- Monitoring becomes possible in bedrooms and bathrooms, where it matters most and cameras cannot go.
Does this look like your site?
Tell us the space, what moves in it, and the decision a position would change. We will tell you which technology fits and what a first deployment would involve.