Milwaukee-based startup Scanalytics Inc. has earned a top award from technology giant Cisco in an IoT for Business development competition.
Scanalytics, which developed smart flooring technology, earned a first place in the Best Smart Building technology category in the contest, which was held this month at Viva Technology 2017 in Paris. More than 5,000 startups and 68,000 people attended Viva Technology.
Scanalytics has developed a sensor-based engagement and analytics platform that monitors human behavior through foot traffic and predictive analytics. Among the uses the company has tested are retail product sales, in which a salesperson could be alerted if a customer is standing near a product, and business conferences, in which organizers can track booth traffic. The company deployed sensors to more than 100 clients globally in 2016.
Cisco and Scanalytics have now collaborated to create a new use for the smart flooring technology. Joe Scanlin, chief executive officer of Scanalytics, and Petr Bambasek, director of product, worked with Cisco engineers to link its technology to Cisco’s Spark cloud collaboration program.
The team created a product through which a chat bot pulls data from Scanalytics’ application programming interface in real time, and communicates it to a building’s occupants via Spark. Among the potential uses was sending a reminder to employees to get up and move during the work day, and to inform building maintenance staff whether a bathroom needs cleaning based on usage.
“We spend a majority of our lives indoors and these environments have a huge impact on everything from business efficiencies and productivity to our overall wellness,” Scanlin said. “Physical environments need to be properly equipped to capture, store and access information on how we interact with them, so they can operate like an autonomous nervous system and adjust themselves accordingly.”
