The smartphones and ubiquitous data connectivity, coupled with rising aspirations of homeowners is driving growth

Silvan Innovation Labs has been offering home automation solutions to address safety, security, convenience and energy management needs of various businesses.

In an interaction, Avinash Gautam, CEO, introduces the various solutions on offer. Excerpts:

BW CIO: Give us a brief about Silvan Innovation Labs and its home automation solutions.

Avinash Gautam: Silvan Innovation Labs (Silvan) is a Bangalore-based company developing practical and intuitive IoT technologies to address safety, security, convenience and energy management needs of various spaces like homes, offices, ATMs, hotel rooms, retails stores, etc.

In the residential space, where such solutions are known, as home automation, Silvan is working with over 35 real-estate developers all over India to pre-fit its solutions into their projects

BW CIO: How do you see home automation evolving in India?

Avinash Gautam: Home automation in India has seen an accelerated acceptance. The almost all-pervasive smartphones and ubiquitous data connectivity, coupled with rising aspirations of home owners is driving its growth. The  market size today is Rs. 8,000 crores and is growing at CAGR of 25 percent.

BW CIO: What are Silvan's latest IoT solutions?

Avinash Gautam: We believe that the IoT solutions needs several innovative products, but at the consumer level it has to be translated into simple, practical and intuitive solutions. Consistent with this trend, Silvan launches four IoT-enabled innovative solutions for homes and enterprises.

Lighting and curtain management:
Lighting plays an important role in our lives in terms of home aesthetics, moods, health and convenience. Silvan addresses the lighting management needs for variety of spaces by offering solutions to manage lights in terms of controls, dimming level, scheduling and energy savings.

Lighting automation in conjunction with conventional switches are enabled by Silvan’s Lumos device. Though Lumos, a user can control the lights using an app, or by giving voice commands. If needed, he can just flip the switch too.  

In the lighting series, Silvan also launched the smart IoT switch – Sansa. Sansa can work as a standalone system replacing the switches. These stylish switches can control the lights in terms of on/off as well as dimming. If multiple Sansa switches are installed, they can talk to each to create interesting scenarios like all/off, which can control the loads connected across the switches.

Silvan’s SIREL module enables wireless control of the curtains for day light harvesting, or simply for convenience.

Climate control
The AC is one of the biggest source of electricity bills for homes and offices, and also a plays a big role in terms of convenience. An effective and convenient way of using ACs is not possible by just using AC remotes. The optimal usage of AC requires that AC should automatically turn off when not needed, should enable control from outside home, should be part of home presets, and should be scheduled as per the need of a premise.

Above all, instead of picking up the remote, you should be able to say things “Change AC temperature to 22 degrees” and it should respond to it. All of this is enabled by Silvan’s voice-ready wireless IR device SIRUS.

Home security and monitoring
As families are becoming smaller and people are becoming more mobile, the need for the home owner to monitor is home when he is away is growing. On top of it, there are several instances when you just want to know whether you closed door or turned-off the gas knob before leaving the home. Silvan’s wireless security system, SECURE, enables all that and more.

Using SECURE, a home owner gets alerted of any untowards incident in his house like intrusions, gas leakage, fire etc. SECURE’s innovative feature of pairing cameras with sensors ensure that home owner not only gets alerted, but he can also see the scene of alert to check for himself exactly what is going on.  

Being completely app-enabled, home owners can also just keep an eye on various things happening in their homes, thus giving them a peace of mind. In the context of communities, Silvan’s complementary cloud service called IPMS (Integrated Property Service Manager) enables centralised monitoring of all the homes by a Security agency, thus enabling a swift local response in case of any inadvertent event

Energy management in enterprises
The smart energy management in enterprises require smart crafting of the solution where energy is saved without compromising the convenience. The conventional occupancy sensor based systems compromise on user convenience, and the sight of people waving at the sensor to keep the lights on in conference room etc is  very common sight.

Added to it is the fact that specific needs of office in terms of solution and scalability tend to be different,  and hence one-size fits all kind of solution does not work very well.

Silvan addresses all of above by its revolutionary energy management IoT node: LumosNRG. LumosNRG is smart, simple, scalable, cloud enabled yet local, and enables an enterprise space to start trying out the automation of their lighting and AC at small level, and then scale up to whatever level they want, just by repeating LumosNRG as many times as needed.

LumosNRG connects to any sensor of choice (like Occupany, Ambient Light etc), and can take actions based on those sensor events locally. It also allows to control the load in scheduled mode, where the sensor outputs will be ignored. Then outside the scheduled time, say out of office hours, it gets into energy saving mode where it starts controlling the loads smartly with sensor inputs like occupancy etc.

It has multiple channels of control, and the sequence in which the loads come up when occupancy is detected, and they turn off when non-occupancy is detected, can be programmed. This gives an unprecedented control to the enterprises to customize their specific solutions to their specific needs.

The rules of the operation of LumosNRG is stored on this module itself, thus making it an independent system which will continue working even in the event of network failures. A working network would be needed only when the rules need updation, or if centralised monitoring and control of all the loads in an enterprise is needed.

Lastly, all the Silvan solutions are voice-enabled and work with the Amazon Echo device.

BW CIO: What are Silvan's plan going forward?

Avinash Gautam: For next three years, we will be focused on ensuring the wide deployment of our solutions in homes and enterprises. We will be strengthening our product portfolio, sales and marketing channels, installer network and customer network a bit more to support this scaling.

BW CIO: Finally, what does smart home as a service (SHaaS) has to offer?

Avinash Gautam: We see this happening quite a lot in US and Europe, but it has not gained that much of the momentum in India. But, quite a few service providers, especially the telecom operators, are looking into it and we expect it to start here soon.