Meeting rooms booking app integrated with IoT gateways and sensors in 6 months

Industry: Telecommunications, Electronics Manufacturing
Location: Canada

Project

Tektelic is a Canadian provider of globally distributed, best-in-class IoT gateway sensors and applications. They engaged Euristiq for the development of fully integrated, end-to-end, IoT smart office solutions that solve the problem of meeting room underutilization. The IoT application tracks the occupancy of each meeting room through the uplink payloads sent by sensors.

Services

Smart office
solutions in 6 months

Room occupancy management system with user-friendly dashboards, integrated with IoT gateways and sensors.

Team of 5 software engineers

High-performance team of IoT development experts.

Timeframe of 6 months

Production-ready booking app for connected devices.

Tools and technologies

Java

Angular

Spring Framework

JHipster

EH2 database

PostgreSQ

Liquibase

Hibernate

Apache Maven

npm

Swagger

TLS

Microservice architecture

B2B

Ribbon

Hystrix

RabbitMQ

AWS

JavaScript

TypeScript

HTML

CSS

PROBLEM

Meeting rooms under-utilization due to overbooking

The client, Canadian provider of best-in-class IoT gateways sensors, noticed a problem with meeting room under-utilization.

In big offices employees tend to overbook rooms, they are empty but they are booked in the calendar. It results in no rooms available to hold an important meeting when it comes up.

The organization requested Euristiq’s help in developing fully integrated, end-to-end, intelligent smart office solutions for their LoRaWANTM IoT gateways and sensors. The requirements included the collection, processing, and visualization of smart telemetry data, recording the performance and meeting room efficiency statistics, and the office manager and user view.

SOLUTION

An IoT solution that tracks meeting room occupancy via sensors and synchronizes with Outlook and Google Calendars

The client specializes in hardware development and decided to offer end-to-end products to be competitive in the marketplace. They have chosen Euristiq among all IoT software development companies with similar scope of services.

Our collaboration began with decisions on the technical stack and architecture engineering. In less than one month Euristiq performance team performed idea validation and developed an MVP (minimum viable product) due to initial requirements. At this stage, the solution had a basic design to define risks, test architecture, and the possibility of Tektelic’s sensor integration with calendars.

The IoT smart office application consists of a room booking app, E-Ink display, and smart room sensors – one PIR sensor per room and acceleration-based movement sensors attached to each chair to detect their occupancy. These sensors collect data regarding room occupancy (whether the room is occupied, with how many people, for how long etc.) that is processed by a custom smart office software developed by Euristiq.

Data collected by room sensors is sent to Network Server via Gateway. The client requested Euristiq’s help with the network server administration system’s maintenance and support, which we took over in just two weeks. We provided updates to the application in addition to quality assurance.

We have fully covered the development of smart office application, starting from business analysis and design, to software development, QA support, and implementation. We have also provided the client with all the necessary documentation and user guides.

To boost product market release, Tektelic also engaged Euristiq embedded engineers in the development of an application bootloader. Our team developed a Sensor bootloader which is a complex system for updating application images on a remote device. It is the application bootloader which consists of two parts: Main Bootloader and Application loader. Our two engineers developed the Main Bootloader and Application loader from scratch. The client received a fully functional and well-tested solution including FW source code, application for the host, architecture design specification, and user manual.

RESULTS

Production-ready smart office software that increases efficient meeting room utilization

Application records performance and provides analytics

For easy meeting room management, we have developed an app integrated with the LoRaWAN IoT gateways and sensors that provides room analytics and displays real-time occupancy status. Smart telemetry data is collected and displayed with an analytics report in a user-friendly dashboard. The application records the performance and usage statistics showing meeting room efficiency with the ‘false booking’ rate (when sensors detect ‘no occupancy’ but the room is still booked in the calendar), room capacity efficiency, time of usage efficiency, room utilization, most popular hours, room popularity, bookings by an employee, and more.

Сompleted solution in 6 months by 5 engineers

Five Euristiq engineers completed an end-to-end smart office solution in 6 months. The client’s meeting room booking display and app have entered volume production.

The solution tracks the occupancy of each meeting room through the uplink payloads sent by sensors. Dashboards are synchronized with the rooms’ bookings in Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar and show whether room is occupied or not.

User-friendly IoT dashboard

Office managers can use the office facility app to set up and edit meeting rooms, including device management (gateways and sensors), the list of equipment available (projector, whiteboard, web camera, TV), room capacity, floor plan, and more.

Users can view available rooms and filter them by floor, capacity, the equipment they have, and free time slots for booking. Rooms are grouped by building. The application also lets users book a vacant room or report a problem if anything is wrong.