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Aug 6, 2024
Small Data Garden, a Finnish start-up that helps builders, real estate professionals and homeowners monitor and control indoor air temperature and ventilation, has developed a turnkey, smart-sensing network solution that increases energy savings by up to 20 percent and reduces maintenance costs by 30 percent. Renesas, a Small Data Garden development partner, spoke with Timo Liukko, Partner and Chairman, to better understand the challenges and opportunities of equipping today’s most advanced air-quality monitoring and control systems with smart IoT devices and cloud-data services.
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Renesas: When was Small Data Garden founded?
Timo: We began working as a team in 2017 to address ventilation systems by installing advanced environmental sensors. Installation was complicated and involved pulling wires and drilling holes and connecting a series of local boxes. It was a terrible process.
Of course, the answer was to adopt a long-range wireless alternative, so we set up some tests and prototypes, and our customers and investors were all very interested to see what we were doing. As we began to scale our business, it all came down to having very good, reliable partners like Renesas and a very good sensor that is allowing us to open new markets.
Renesas: What is it about sensing and data collection that caused you to gravitate to this market?
Timo: We are heavily focused on the housing construction market. This is an area of focus within the Nordic region because of our heavy weather conditions and difficult winters, which require high-quality materials that we need for extremely low-energy buildings. This also creates challenges for building ventilation given how weather-tight our structures need to be.
Early on, when we were testing our technology, we came across a special application for logistics and asset tracking of reindeer herd health. There is a population of about 200,000 reindeer in Finland that requires continuous monitoring, every day, in any weather.
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This is a niche focus for us, but what we learned and that we have applied to the construction industry is that, to track reindeer herds, you need very good radio technology, and you need very good sensors that can operate under a variety of harsh environmental conditions. The sensors themselves also need to operate for a long time. With our device technology, there is no replacement or maintenance required typically for five years.
Renesas: Tell us more about Small Data Garden’s solutions.
Timo: Poor indoor air quality influences tenant comfort, property value, energy efficiency and can compromise productivity in work environments. Our growing line of smart sensor solutions detects a variety of environmental changes to air quality, CO2 levels, temperature, relative humidity, air pressure and the presence of volatile organic compounds. You can find our family of IOTSU® VARMA Indoor Air Quality solutions in everything from the home and office to public spaces and construction sites.
It's a testament to our ability to combine multiple sensors into one unit while maintaining high measurement standards and a long battery life. This is where Renesas gas sensors fit perfectly.
Renesas: When it comes to indoor air quality and building construction, how does Small Data Garden differentiate yourselves from competing air-quality solutions?
Timo: I think the big picture was a recognition that we needed to add value for our customers and show that we are more than just box movers. To accelerate time to adoption and time to market, we knew that we couldn’t have too many intermediate parties like systems integrators or data management service providers.
So, we added smart devices and environmental alarms that are easy to control, measure and manage. In order to get closer to our customers, we began offering services on how to interpret and present data and how best to manage the sensors in order to take care of the entire sensor fleet. That’s how we ended up offering smart devices, complete device solutions and, now, a full suite of cloud services that sends data to the customer in real time in addition to weekly reports on how their buildings are doing. It’s a direct feedback system.
Renesas: It sounds like you’ve created a turnkey device and service solution. What comes next?
Timo: After the sensor networks and data service offering, the third step is to launch services that not only track data but provide some form of actionable, automated feedback. If a sensor sends out an alarm, for example, we want to transfer this information in a simple way that allows the ventilation system to turn up the exhaust fan. When the sensor indicates that the air quality is back within prescribed limits, the ventilation systems step down. These kinds of smart links extend the benefits of our value-added services and IoT solutions.
Renesas: Air quality has become much more of a focus for the construction industry, which is scrambling to define and set operating standards. How are you navigating this landscape?
Timo: Even within the European Union, there are several standards and projects. We have been lucky, because we have been able to get out ahead of a lot of these issues by talking with customers across several regions to really understand and best address their individual needs. Of course, this requires us to work closely with local partners to ensure we’re providing customers with the necessary test environments and certification and documentation processes.
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Renesas: How did you come to engage with Renesas as a design partner?
Timo: We were looking for the best partners and technologies, and Renesas was recommended to us as having sensing devices that were low-power, flexible, easy to set up and test and required no calibration. This was in addition to being able to access Renesas’ engineering support team to help answer our questions.
We ended up designing in the Renesas ZMOD4410 indoor air quality sensor, which has a life cycle of more than 10 years and an easily configurable firmware architecture that can be downloaded from one of the Renesas firmware libraries. The sensor is AI-enabled, which means it constantly adapts to changing environmental conditions without the need for recalibration, which is something that’s required by other air-quality sensors. This automated adaptability feature was very important to us.
Renesas: Where does Small Data Garden see itself in the next few years?
Timo: We know the Nordic and European markets very well, and I think the same kinds of environmental and air quality considerations are becoming apparent in other markets, including the U.S. We are seeing a growing realization that indoor air quality is an important component of sustainability that can only be managed through robust, automated data collection, analysis and presentation. The market is open now. The time to invest and scale up services is now.