KPN unwraps smart IoT sensor service for schools

KPN has launched a new IoT service that helps schools, nursing homes, and companies to create a healthy indoor climate. It is a smart sensor, a box the size of a plug socket that can be easily located in an indoor space.

The sensor measures the level of CO2 in a room. The readings allow customers to target ventilation to provide a healthy learning or working environment.

Last Monday, the CVO school group from the Rotterdam region started using the CO2 sensors in all their 670 classrooms. Ton Bestebreur, member of CVO’s Board of Management: “CVO, like many other schools, is working on the principle of the ‘fresh school’, a school with a healthy indoor climate that considers air quality, temperature, comfort, light and noise. Corona is holding a magnifying glass to the principle of the fresh school; ventilation has become a very urgent issue. Good ventilation helps to limit the transmission of respiratory infections, such as COVID-19. Especially now the winter is approaching, we do not want to leave our 20,000 pupils and 2,000 teachers sitting in a classroom with open windows all day. This new service helps us with this.”

Internet of Things

“KPN has been connecting people for almost 140 years. Relatively recently, we have also been connecting internet-enabled devices via the Internet of Things. With our latest IoT service, KPN CO2 monitoring, we are helping customers to create healthy learning and working environments in indoor spaces. This is topical, now more than ever”, says Carolien Nijhuis, KPN’s Internet of Things director.

The sensor, which is located in the indoor space, has an LED light that indicates the colors of a traffic light: green, orange and red, based on prescribed threshold values. This allows teachers to see (and, if desired, also hear via a signal) how the indoor climate is at that moment. This way, they know exactly when to open a window to provide the classroom with fresh air. All rooms are monitored continuously via the IoT connection. The data is also centrally gathered in one overview, making it possible to obtain an insight into the indoor climate per school and per classroom, in turn, making it possible to act in a targeted way.

LoRa

In addition to CO2, KPN CO2 monitoring also measures humidity and temperature. The sensors work via the LoRa network. LoRa stands for Long Range, Low Power and is a nationwide network specially developed to exchange small amounts of information between objects and systems. A LoRa module can send data for more than ten years on just two batteries.