Smart Campus Building Analytics application and planning tool

This page provides some background and insight into the Smart Campus Building Analytics application, including how the data used is de-identified to protect personal privacy.

The Building Analytics application is a key deliverable from the University's Smart Campus programme.  The application provides a number of dashboards that provide insights into the occupancy levels within building across the estate, and also into travel patterns across the estate/campus.   These dashboards are used as a planning tool by the Estates Space and Property Management team only.  The occupancy data, which is de-identified to protect personal privacy,  will also be used to help students find study spaces and resources, and will be made available for research.

The University requires reliable and timely information on the utilisation of its buildings by staff and students to serve a number of operational purposes, such as:

  • Provide information to students on likely availability of facilities within buildings based on occupancy level, e.g. availability and location of study spaces.
  • Provide information on utilisation of buildings to drive better energy efficiency including real-time response and forecast demand control of building management systems such as HVAC (Heating, Ventilation, Air-Conditioning)
  • To understand the pattern of use by organisational cohorts of the University to support data driven decision making regarding improvements in the use of the University estate.

To provide information on travel patterns between university campuses to support data driven decision making regarding travel policy.


The application will:

  • Support data driven decision making, which is fundamental to ensuring space optimisation across the estate, ensuring we are ‘right sized’, making efficient use of our spaces, and minimising the carbon and cost impact of underutilised space, which will work towards our net zero targets. 
  • Underpin the University's Digital Strategy’s ambition to present a unified Physical and Digital Estate, by directly delivering against enable digital technologies to better understand, leverage and drive efficiencies in our campus. This will include the use of real time data to support data driven innovation within our physical and virtual campuses. 
  • Support the new emerging Estates Strategy and in turn the University's capital spending plans from 2027.
  • Improve the student experience by providing information to students on availability of facilities within buildings based on occupancy level, e.g. availability of spaces for students to study. 
  • Help to ensure workplace design is suitable and right sized, which in turn will benefit staff wellbeing and experience. 
  • Be a source of building utilisation data that will be available for research.

The Building Analytics application uses pre-existing data from the Wi-Fi and gate/door entry systems.   It does not use data from the wired network. 

The data has sophisticated pseudonymisation applied prior to processing to ensure personal identity is removed and personal privacy is protected. The data is then used to estimate occupancy levels within buildings, and to estimate intercampus travel patterns, with these findings presented on dashboards. 

The data is aggregated to give a count of visitors per building, or an area within a building, over a sample period, e.g. for a given hour or for a whole day. With these systems, the detection of presence is limited to those people that have an active WiFi login to the University's WiFi networks from a device they are using, e.g. a mobile phone or laptop, and those individuals that swipe their University ID badge when entering or exiting a controlled access gate or door.  

We may also utilise discrete sensors deployed into the campus environment, such as PIR (Passive Infrared) sensors to measure movement through a door, or CO2 sensors to indicate if a room is occupied. These sensors capture no personal information - they cannot determine who someone is - and are used to detect that people may be present within the space being monitored.


The project team consulted with the ISG Ethics Board, with no issues raised.

There have been multiple consultations with EUSA and staff union reps, including consultation for the original pilot of the system, and in preparation for the full production go-live.  The only concern raised was regarding the possibility of "surveillance".    As described in the text above and the DPIA, the data used is de-identified, and personal privacy is protected, so surveillance does not and cannot take place. 

The University's Data Protection Officer (DPO) was regularly consulted during the Data Privacy Impact Assessment (DPIA) and a Legitimate Interest Assessment (LIA). These completed successfully and have been approved by the DPO. The completed and approved DPIA and LIA documents can be found here:

The existing privacy notices for students, staff and visitors have been updated to cover the Building Analytics application, and these can be found here: 


Are you interested in the insights the data brings?

If you have a refurbishment, relocation or expansion project, or planning to carry out some research work, where this data could be of use. Please contact the Estates Team on: Space.Management@ed.ac.uk 

 

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