by Brianna Crandall — December 5, 2016 — Legrand North and Central America global specialist in electrical and digital building infrastructures, recently launched ELIOT, an Internet of Things (IoT) program that advances connectivity and intelligence in the built environment.
John Selldorff, chief executive officer of Legrand North and Central America, explained:
At Legrand, we have the technologies to facilitate better connectivity and intelligence that enable enhanced productivity, efficiency, comfort and sustainability. ELIOT aggregates these technologies and signals our intent to assure the market that Legrand will continue to advance connectivity and intelligence in the built environment.
The IoT is here today, Selldorff said, and will drive change. ELIOT — a name formed by combining the terms “electricity and “IoT” — represents Legrand’s strategy from transforming its business model. It will offer gateways for installed legacy offerings, an array of natively connected new products, a purpose-built cloud, and innovative solutions comprising connected, intelligent technologies and services.
In other news from the event:
- Legrand reaffirmed its commitment to Cisco’s Digital Ceiling Framework. Legrand joined the framework as an ecosystem partner in June of this year. The framework objective revolves around the convergence of previously disparate networks, enabling a greater level of building intelligence by leveraging the information from other devices not previously connected.
- Legrand reiterated the importance of its recent partnership with Lumenetix. The two companies are working together to accelerate advanced digital lighting applications such as human-centric lighting (HCL). “What makes [HCL] part of IOT is that people want these systems to be smart, learning and connected to make them easier to install, maintain, monitor, and adapt for performance,” Selldorff said.
- Legrand reinforced its pursuit of a dynamic spectrum, IoT, healthy lighting solution for commercial installations. The company is advancing towards customizable, dynamic-spectrum lighting solution to enable the optimum health benefits lighting can provide. More than simply changing the color temperature to mimic a dawn-to-dusk environment — a purely psychological impact — Legrand’s IoT solution will target melanopic wavelength and will “follow” the individual as they go through their 24-hour cycle and rely on actual biometric feedback.
The company also announced it will be testing network-presence sensing (NPS) technology with Legrand switches. NPS technology monitors RF (radio-frequency) signal strength between switches, lights, and other IoT devices, and detects the interference created when people or animals are present in the wireless network.
Such technology can grow over the product life cycle through over-the-air updates since NPS uses the wireless communications already built into Legrand RF devices. The resulting analytics can determine presence, motion, direction and speed, and when deployed with other IoT devices could provide safer, more efficient, more intelligent workplaces.
As of November 2016, there are over 22 million Legrand connection points already in existence, says the company. For more information, visit the ELIOT program Web site.
