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GStT - The Core

Connor Felstead • 7 October 2024

St Thomas’ Hospital expands with The Core

Background

A new build block at Guy's and St Thomas', specialising in infant and childcare was built next to the pre-existing Evelina building. With an ever-growing need for infant and antenatal care, catering for over 6500 babies per year, St Thomas' needed to expand. The Core, or ‘DSEC’, located in the heart of St Thomas’, allows GSTT to start with smart building controls in mind, rather than retrofitting to become a part of a smarter world.

Challenge

A brand-new building, replacing an open area, needed to be set-up to be fully future proof. This involved implementing smart controls, smart monitoring and customised settings for a multitude of different use conditions.

The objectives, mainly, were to allow smart monitoring of all assets as well as full smart lighting control with the ability to add more features going forward.

Solution

The Mymesh smart control system was designed throughout the building, monitoring just under 1000 unique assets through the 5-floor new build. All rooms would have one of two Mymesh based smart controls, or in some cases both. The smart PIRs would turn lights on when a person enters the room, and where applicable, would daylight harvest natural light from windows and dim the lights accordingly, so a uniform lux level is created over the room, while utilising as much natural light to save energy. This would then turn the lights off, or to a dimmer state when not in use.

Where a smart switch was based, a user could dim the lights to an appropriate level to match what they believe to be suitable lux levels. As users have different needs, and hospitals cycle users with a higher frequency than almost any other organisation, this was critical to allow a user to obtain the correct light level for their eyes, while not inducing migraines or causing eye strain associated with modern LEDs.

With Mymesh devices spread throughout the building and each asset knowing it’s location, asset tracking has now been established in this building via Mymesh asset tracking protocols. A device publishing on the Mymesh channels tracks its positioning and can be displayed on an app of choice for easy location finding.

The Lumitel dashboard is utilised over this install, so all devices are monitored in real time with energy usage, emergency status, triggers, space utilisation and much more. Via the platform, dynamic lighting control has also been used to maximise energy savings over site.

Benefits

The implementation of smart controls on the new LEDs has achieved massive energy savings as well as ensuring compliance across the whole building. The dimming features of the Mymesh system not only contribute to this energy saving, but also improve the longevity of assets, this has been confirmed by rigorous testing.

The remote monitoring and lighting control allow the reduction of full-time employment required to maintain the building, allowing more time to be spent with other older parts of the hospital.

From the beginning, the use of Mymesh has reduced the through cabling required for the control infrastructure. This has had a large impact on the reduction of carbon usage in the building.