Smart technology promises greater peace of mind and autonomy for users. Not only will it provide greater convenience, it also facilitates better connectivity and control of their home and office environments and through automation allows people to spend more time and energy on the things that matter to them.
When I started Habitap in 2016, I built it on the premise of bringing technology seamlessly into our homes to empower our vision of a smart nation. We created a seamless user experience around three key pillars: Smart controls, smart community and as a lifestyle gateway, into an integrated mobile app.
We aim to make it easy for users using various brands of smart devices to control their devices on one convenient platform in a bid to introduce the use of smart home devices to the masses. We focused on pre-integrating them seamlessly into one single mobile application, with a consistent and therefore familiar user experience.
We recognised that we also live in communities and access common areas functions such as booking of meeting rooms, simple functions such as opening of mailboxes, or accessing e-commerce parcel stations and we linked them to the Habitap app.
I like to think that we are revolutionising the way people can interact with common spaces. We have transformed old school visitor management into the digital age. Today, visitors will be issued with a QR code so they could scan and enter condominiums. Homeowners could also receive a video call from the visitor on their mobile phones without the need to do so from the typical wall-mounted intercom screen in our home.
We also understood the growing trend of accessing lifestyle services from online platforms, and have made Habitap a convenient and seamless gateway to major platforms from transportation to food delivery and even home cleaning services.
In 2017, we pioneered this same smart living concept in office buildings and workplaces. And over the last three years, we saw a rapid surge in commercial developments adopting smart building platforms to provide convenient digital access for both tenants and visitors.
Habitap alone manages 15 commercial buildings. As you can see, smart technology for managing buildings is fast becoming the norm in Singapore. All of the above sought to bring connectivity and control to people, with the idea of offering a convenient way to manage their homes. Through this, we hope to help them improve their lives.
By 2020, the market has come to accept a new norm: a connected world from the home to office where most services could be accessed using an app. What is exciting is how we could now use this connectivity in a more predictive way.
Using A.I and data, your home would be able to learn your preferences and offer insights into creating greater convenience in your life. For example, if you always used the water heater or the air conditioner at a specific time of the week, the A.I component could prompt you to turn it into a preset.
The pandemic has changed the way we all live and work
In the near term, the immediate challenges are how we perform contact tracing and distribute real-time news and alerts. Habitap has been pivotal in becoming a readily available and suitable platform. At short notice, we were able to send alerts to all office tenants and condominium residents in the form of push notifications and measure readership of those alerts.
Within four weeks of the circuit breaker Singapore, we integrated safe entry and temperature taking into building access control systems and present data reports to ensure safe measures were in place.
In the long term, the real estate industry recognises the inevitable changes to how we live and work. Contactless functionality is now a requirement in real estate designs. For example, electronic parcel stations create a buffer for deliveries of all office parcels.
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In upcoming condominiums, food delivery stations and gym pods are being integrated into the design. The concept of using our mobile devices as digital access is now further developed into elevator call panels where users can call for elevators using a mobile app.
Moving forward from 2020, Habitap aims to be that app that connects people together through physical and virtual spaces. Secure and intelligent, Habitap manages facilities and offers services where every individual can enjoy the benefits of belonging to the community.
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