In line with Singapore’s drive to become a Smart Nation, the Glocal Connect Village (GCV) is now home to the MINESpace,a system that uses smart lighting to facilitate attendance taking, fault reporting and inventory checking via a mobile app for students taking the Cross Disciplinary Subject, TransNational Studies. This subject entails a two week long stay at the GCV apartments.
Smart lighting, which makes use of Philips Lighting’s Visible Light Communication (VLC), was adapted by two separate teams of students from the Diploma in Integrated Facility Management (IFM) as well as the Diploma in Infocomm & Network Engineering (INE). This was part of their winning idea in the polytechnic-wide competition “Light Beyond Illumination: The Smart Campus Edition”, which ran from Aug 15, 2016 to Oct 31, 2016.
INE student Kendrick Lee, 21, was one of the student engineers that brought this idea to life. “The traditional way is for lecturers to manually take the attendance of their students at their apartment using the student’s passes. After 10.30pm, they are physically banned from leaving the premises,” said the third-year student.
However, with MINESpace, this process will now take students between five to 15 minutes instead of the usual 30 to 40 minutes per night, effectively saving plenty of time. The students can also access the app within the comfort of their own apartments.
To take their attendance, students will firstly need to login into the app, then tap on ‘Check in Attendance’, point their smartphone cameras towards the designated light(s) and tap on ‘Check In’ to scan the light and transmit the data to the system. With VLC, each fixture sends its own unique identifier to a registered smartphone which pinpoints the student’s location and registers them at the same time. This process is the same for both fault reporting and inventory checking. Lecturers can check the students’ attendance by searching for their apartment in the web portal.
Besides the added convenience, the use of VLC means that the polytechnic can cut down on maintenance costs as well.
Mr Jitender Khurana, head of Professional Lighting Systems at Philips Lighting, pointed out the benefits: “With the new LED luminaries, Temasek Polytechnic also gets to enjoy a lighting lifetime of up to 70,000 hours with lighting controls, resulting in drastically reduced maintenance costs from operational downtime and disruption.”
In the Facility Management industry, President of IFMA (Singapore Chapter) Tony Khoo mentioned that VLC has many useful applications that can help improve the shortage of manpower.
“Young people are creative and are using technology to make their life easier and more productive. Many a time, innovation is not about new technology but about putting two existing technologies together to solve existing pain points,” he said.
The winners of the competition were rewarded with a trip to the Philips’ headquarters in Amsterdam where they visited ‘The Edge’, – the world’s greenest, smartest and most connected office building.
Jaspreet Kaur, 20, one winners, said: “Before joining the competition, lighting was nothing other than extension of a day. However, it all changed after going on a learning journey to Netherlands and competing my internship with Philips Lighting Singapore. With my newly acquired knowledge, light now is a tool that I believe, will change the near future.
By: Kristie Tan
