According to the companies taking part in this joint effort, it will provide the first mass-market, end-to-end wireless gateway solution to ensure connectivity with sensors for production-level industrial and commercial applications.
It is intended that the solution will deliver massive scalability, the deepest possible building penetration, integration and interoperability with legacy systems, along with extremely long battery life for nodes.
This collaboration aims to meet growing demand in the marketplace for robust and comprehensive out-of-the-box wireless IIoT communications solutions to connect the various sensors used by industrial and commercial customers in their business intelligence efforts.
The foundation for the joint effort is BTI MIOTY, a low-power, wide-area network (LPWAN) communications solution that is currently the only one to use the ETSI standard telegram splitting ultra-narrow band (TS-UNB) technical specification for low throughput networks, enabling organizations to deploy private IoT sensor networks with unprecedented capacity, high Quality-of-Service (QoS), and low total cost of ownership.
Using industry-standard Advantech gateways, BTI MIOTY will be able to transmit up to 1.5 million messages per day within a radius of five to 15kms, with no carrier requirements. Layered atop this infrastructure, Hitachi Solutions´ IoT Service Hub will enable organisations to connect and monitor devices and analyse the data in real time to dramatically improve operational efficiencies.
“Through this collaboration with Microsoft, Hitachi Solutions, and BTI, we are working to deliver an integrated IIoT solution,” said Stephen Huang, associate vice president of Advantech´s Embedded IoT Group. “Our Edge Intelligence Server provides a device-to-cloud solution at the edge. With WISE-PaaS EdgeSense IoT software built into the gateway, we can provide connectivity and manageability at the edge to simplify IIoT applications.”
The first application to come out of this collaboration is a new approach to workforce safety using the BTI MIOTY LPWAN wireless solution on an industry-standard gateway.
Using a wearable device to monitor the heart rate of workers in industrial high-risk environments, data on the health of hundreds of workers is transmitted over unlicensed, sub-gigahertz frequencies via BTI MIOTY to a single Advantech base station. From there, it is communicated to the Microsoft Cloud, where Hitachi Solutions´ IoT Service Hub can provide actionable insights on workers´ health and send alerts when workers are in danger.
Employers, such as mining site operators, will be able to deploy this end-to-end solution to protect their workforce with unprecedented responsiveness at a fraction of the cost of previously available technologies.