Computing academics help company support infrastructure safety

Computing academics have helped a local tech firm go ‘full steam ahead’ with helping companies manage the data generated by building and structural safety.

It’s vital to keep an eye on the ‘health’ of buildings and other structures such as bridges, dams, and railways. But different structures across different locations have varying ‘health’ requirements, for instance, buildings in colder or warmer regions face different stressors.

These and other factors need to be considered and Northampton-based Dyna-Mo Instruments developed a solution involving sensors to help companies monitor these structures.

With such a large amount of data, Dyna-Mo Instruments needed a little help themselves, which came from a crack team* of computing experts at University of Northampton (UON).

The team – led by Dr Triantafyllos ‘Aldo’ Kanakis, Senior Lecturer in Computing – set to work on a Proof-of-Concept engagement to find the right solution to store and record the information and present the data in a user-friendly format for devices suitable to third-party providers.

Aldo explains: “We have been proud to work with Dyna-Mo Instruments over the past few weeks, a project with clear applications to real-world safety and rail efficiency.

“We suggested organising the data in a structured and synchronised Cloud-based data lake (centralised place for data). The data feeds from different facilities can be organised in data lakes, several dashboards and in a user-friendly format for users to compare the data, look for relationships and analyse them.

“We are pleased to report that Dyna-Mo liked our proposal, and we are looking forward to discussing how can we help with the implementation stage.”

Toby Cottam, Managing Director of Dyna-Mo Instruments, adds: “Although most of our clients are engineering, instrumentation and monitoring and surveying companies, they themselves are often required to provide access to project data visualisation to their clients. Their clients need an easy to use, intuitive dashboard to quickly understand the data being presented to them.

“The proposal documentation has enabled us to engage with key development and adoption partners to put the platform through it passes and ensure the end-product serves both the technical and non-technical persons involved in a variety of monitoring applications.

“The support provided by the University of Northampton has been invaluable in determining the feasibility and practicalities of the development of our visualisation platform. We have been able to accelerate our plans and now have a clear path to deliver the first release of the platform in 2023.”

This project was funded through Knowledge Exchange for Better Business which is a Community Renewal funded project managed by West Northamptonshire Council, which helps link business with University expertise.

*The full list of UON project team members and their responsibilities is:

• Dr Triantafyllos ‘Aldo’ Kanakis – Project Manager, technology architecture.
• Dr James Xue, Senior Lecturer in Computing – James led on creating and organising the ‘data lake’.
• Professor Michael Opoku Agyeman – Michael has expertise with sensor data and gave understanding about the connections between devices and controllers.