Philips leads lighting for the internet of Things
Philips Lighting, the world leader in lighting, announced a new Internet of Things (IoT) platform called Interact, which will enable its professional customers to unlock the full potential of connected lighting for the IoT. The platform supports the company’s strategy to deliver new data-enabled services as value expands from lighting products and systems to services.
It also announced connected lighting systems that can generate and upload data to its Interact IoT platform to power a growing portfolio of data-enabled services.
Philips Lighting has already installed 29 million connected light points worldwide and plans for every new LED product it produces to be connectable by 2020. This growing number of connected light points, sensors and devices, as well as systems, can collect large volumes of data for which Interact was designed to handle. The highly secure, scalable cloud-based Interact platform uses sophisticated and modern data management and data processing capabilities, including machine learning, to bring sense to all manner of data – creating data-enabled services for customers that will deliver benefits beyond illumination.
Atypical example of such a service is occupancy data from different buildings, combined and analyzed to help managers to understand and predict how people use office space. Such insights can help deliver savings by optimizing the use of existing office space and support better designed, more efficient buildings.
In addition, data from authorized third-parties can also be analyzed by Interact. For example, for a municipal authority, news articles and social media posts, reacting to a new lighting installation on a bridge, can be analyzed and data sent to a social impact app dashboard that summarizes the public sentiment.
“First, we led the way in energy efficient LED lighting, then in connecting lighting to deliver operational benefits for our customers. Now that light points are smart enough to collect data on their performance and the environment around them, we are tapping into that intelligence. By analyzing the data from our connected lights, devices and systems, our goal is to create additional value for our customers through data-enabled services that unlock new capabilities and experiences,” said Harsh Chitale, leader of Philips Lighting’s Professional Business.
Interact is also designed to foster innovation from third-party developers, development partners and customers. It includes a developer portal and a growing suite of licensed APIs, so that various data-enabled services can be developed.
Available at present are Interact City for public space lighting, roads, streets, pedestrian areas, parks and plazas; Interact Landmark for architectural lighting; Interact Office for offices and commercial buildings; Interact Retail for large retail and food stores and Interact Sports for stadiums.