Use Cases of University IoT shared infrastructure and services

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a rapidly evolving and expanding collection of diverse devices and wearables that interact with the edge devices and Cloud applications. With growth in computing & storage capabilities on Cloud, the barriers to achieve real time monitoring and tracking on environment and activities become much lower.

A shared IoT infrastructure has been established, covering data collection, data analysis and reporting aspect, is useful for research projects and campus facilities management:

A private LoRaWan network infrastructure covering the open areas of the campus
A data collection & provisioning infrastructure for collecting telemetry data from edge devices irrespective of the location of the devices and provisioning the collected data to external database
A data visualization platform for users to analyse the collected data with dashboard
Near-to-real time alert can be generated based on anomalies detected from edge devices
Edge devices can be managed via the IoT infrastructure to perform corresponding actions based on the telemetry data or open data

The followings are some use cases showing how departments leverage the IoT infrastructure and related services to achieve their operational needs or research project data collection/data analysis.

Use Case 1 - Laboratory facility monitoring

Common Animal Facility (CAF) uses IoT sensors to monitor temperature, humidity and luminous flux in their laboratory. The edge devices are connected to the University LoRaWan Infrastructure. ITS has developed a dashboard with the collected telemetry data for CAF to monitor the environmental situation in the lab. As such, respective colleagues can receive alerts from their mobile devices, in case of any anomaly activities based on the pre-defined thresholds.

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Use Case 2 – Research data collection from edge devices on campus

Dr. Charles Wong, Associate Head and Associate Professor of The Department of Land Surveying and Geo-Informatics (LSGI), has deployed the LoRaWan-based tree tilt sensors to measure the tilting angle of the trees on campus. These IoT sensors are connected to the University’s LoRaWan network infrastructure. Through the data provisioning infrastructure, ITS has helped LSGI to collect and fetch the remotely sensed data from sensors to database server of the research team via the shared IoT infrastructure. Meanwhile, the sensing interval of edge devices can be controlled based on the open data of weather signals provided by the Hong Kong Observatory.

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Use Case 3 – Research data collection from edge devices off campus

School of Optometry (SO) has deployed a number of sensors distributed in various locations in Hong Kong to capture research data. The data is fed to a Cloud based MQTT server. ITS has helped to retrieve these research data from the MQTT server back to IoT data visualization infrastructure for the research project team to analyse the data.

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Use Case 4 – Facilities Management using IoT technologies

Facilities Management Office (FMO) has kicked start a number of Proof-of-concept projects to leverage IoT technologies in building facilities management. Water leakage sensors are deployed in plant rooms to monitor water leakage situation. If anomalies are detected, FMO colleagues will receive a telegram message alert.

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If departments are interested in IoT services, please feel free to contact us at its.iot@polyu.edu.hk for information and detail.