Honeywell, asmag.com hold webinar: ‘Shaping the Future of Life Safety’

Life safety is an important element in security. Products and solutions under this category must be robust and reliable enough to help save lives in the event of an emergency. In a webinar, “Shaping the Future of Life Safety,” held by Honeywell and asmag.com on Nov. 30, panelists from Honeywell and their technology partners discussed the latest trends and technologies in the field of life safety.
 
In his presentation, Hans Chang, Senior Demand Generation Representative for Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan at Honeywell, discussed his company’s range of IP-based public address and voice alarm (PAVA) systems.
 
In particular, Chang spoke about Honeywell’s X-618, an advanced PAVA solution for public settings that is compliant with EN54-16, the European standard for voice alarm systems. Specifically, X-618 includes certain innovative features, including support of 100 channels of audio signals concurrently, active and standby electrical interfaces of all system equipment, system capacity 2000 partitions, communication using TLS encryption, and chip-level encrypted certificate storage area.
 
According to Chang, Honeywell PAVA solutions are ideal for different verticals, especially commercial, rail, airport and industrial.
 
“In commercial, that is hotels, malls, office buildings and mixed properties, users need many functions, especially for the PA system to be able to deliver more than 100 streams to different parts of the building using a small amount of power. For rail, there are so many systems that need to be integrated together. For airports we need PA to inform passengers of places they need to go. Then for industrial, power plants, mobile phone assemblies, semiconductor fabs and chemical factories all have stringent PA requirements. They can all benefit from our solutions,” Chang said.
 
Chang further discussed Honeywell’s other PAVA solutions, including INTEVIO and VARIODYN D1, the latter of which supports a large number of evacuation and/or paging zones, manages complicated evacuation strategies in the event of an emergency, and enables IP connectivity to link multiple nodes.
 

The importance of audio

 
Audio plays a critical role in life safety. During an emergency, the last thing people need is muffled, broken sound that’s hard to understand. Having a system that offers good audio quality, then, is vital.
 
This is where Zenitel comes in. The company is a leader in intercom and public address systems that are especially ruggedized for critical environments. In his presentation, Felix You, Business Development Manager of Onshore for China BU at Zenitel, spoke on advanced features that make Zenitel stand out, one of them being audio quality.
 
According to him, Zenitel technology includes a turbine design that eliminates distortion; active noise reduction that suppresses interfering background noise; automatic volume/automatic gain control that adjust output volume to noise levels of ambient environment; and acoustic echo cancellation that prevents feedback even at high volume.
 
He also spoke on Zenitel solutions including IC-EDGE systems that allow superior audio quality, interoperability, cybersecurity and easy deployment; and the ICX-AlphaCom platform that supports up to 552 IC devices per node, allows streamlined and unified management, and features built-in cybersecurity.
 
These highlights make Zenitel suitable for a variety of verticals, including buildings, smart city, education, healthcare, prison and industrial. “When you add our IP solutions to your building, it becomes interactive. Security guards can instantly speak to people they see on the video system, regardless of distance. If the person is lost or simply needs assistance, it is easy for an operator in charge to assist them directly,” You said. “In healthcare, sensitive areas such as cleanrooms and isolation rooms can be monitored and restricted via intercom stations to ensure that only those authorized to enter have access. All our stations can be integrated into nurse call, phone and radio systems to ensure compatibility with any setup.
 

Fire IoT

 
In her presentation, Eza Leung, Director of Protect International Holding, spoke on fire IoT. She began by referring to technologies such as 5G that have helped enable IoT, which is now prevalent in the everyday life from transportation to manufacturing. Now it can also be applied in firefighting and emergency prevention and response. For example, robots and drones can now be deployed to help extinguish fire, interacting with each other, the building and the control center all via the Internet.
 
She also talked about the danger of having a fire in a tunnel and how it can be dealt with by fire IoT, using Hong Kong’s Tuen Mun-Chek Lap Kok Link as an example. “The project entails 52 panels, 20 controllers, 2,200 detectors, 5,400 modules and 48,800 meters of fiber, using a platform that provides various values, including new capabilities to predict and alert, 7x24 monitoring from anywhere, increase productivity and efficiency, reduce impact to occupants and tenant by cutting out downtime, and reduce potential property damage or loss,” Leung said.