By Charles Paumelle

Fire accidents result in thousands of tragedies every day. When an emergency happens, seconds and minutes of faster intervention can mean the difference between life and death. Connecting your smoke detector is that difference. As digital transformation has enabled more of our lives to be connected. Network-enabled fire detection has the power to let more people and systems know about an emergency and speed up response time. So why are most smoke detectors still offline?

The Internet of Things (IoT) has been slowly growing for the last two decades. It has peaked through the global pandemic, as the adoption of remote monitoring has skyrocketed. We can now deploy thousands of battery-powered sensors in a building with a 10-year battery life. All connected by a long-range network independent of the usual corporate networks, all at a disruptively cheap cost.

The result? A central command-and-control center who has 24/7 oversight of the condition of properties they’re managing. These sensors can deploy staff to intervene exactly where they’re needed, when they’re needed.

Apply that approach to fire detection and you can see the potential: connected fire alarms can alert people and systems beyond the reach of the visible or audible alert they normally generate.

As a result, intervention is faster. These smoke detectors can also use their idle time (after all, we all install fire alarms hoping they will never trigger) to gather and transmit other information. Things such as environmental, comfort and air quality data (think: temperature, humidity, CO or CO2). This gives us the opportunity to build analytic models with the potential to spot a fire before it’s actually started. Fire detectors are great, but they’re like airbags in a car: they’re reactive. What if they could be more like a collision-avoidance system, which makes sure the car detects danger ahead and stops before the accident happens and airbags deploy?

Long-range, Low-power wireless networks are a useful tool in fire detection because they’re easy to deploy without cabling and unlike Wi-Fi, they can penetrate through walls and floors much better. Sensors allow connected devices to run on batteries for many years and they are not dependent on the building infrastructure. So, if the internet goes down in a fire, the alarms will remain connected. Using an open standard such as LoRaWAN® means the smoke detectors can benefit from being seen and connected to several overlapping networks. This results in greater resilience without a massive additional cost with no data security risk, as the networks can only transfer but not decrypt the data.

The Microshare data management platform is the key to your organization’s ability to leverage IoT data in weeks, not years. Our Rules Engine, Dynamic Data Modules, Application Accelerators and our unique Data Ownership Module ensure your data is collected, analyzed and distributed in a secure and compliant way to the right party and the right time in the right format.