01732 759725 magazine 31 Flexible London workspace Halkin Mainframe has upgraded six of its meeting rooms with a dual conferencing setup that combines the reliability of dedicated Zoom Rooms with the versatility of BYOD connectivity. Housed in an historic building a stone’s throw from King’s Cross St Pancras, Halkin Mainframe offers a mix of private offices, open-plan coworking spaces, breakout areas, an event space and technology-enabled meeting rooms that can adapt to different styles of collaboration. Alongside Neat Board Pro systems running Zoom Rooms, Halkin Mainframe’s new meeting rooms feature platform-agnostic BX USB-C Breakout Hubs from Ashton Bentley, a Kramer company that allow tenants and guests to connect their own devices to the room’s native Zoom experience or switch to Teams, Webex, Google Meet or any other platform from their own device. Jack Cornish, Technical Director at integration partner Tateside, said: “We selected Ashton Bentley due to the success and reliability we’ve had with them on previous projects. The BX has proven to be a great piece of kit that delivers what, on the face of it, appears to be a simple task. Yet this is exactly where many of the supposedly more cost-effective hubs have let us down.” Featuring enterprise-grade durability, the BX USB-C Breakout Hub is scalable to rooms of any size and can be fixed under desks or in cable trays, keeping installations clean and uncluttered. Useful features include a locking USB-C connector that prevents accidental disconnections; automatic 5V USB switching between the installed Zoom Room system and a user’s own laptop or device, for a seamless BYOD handover; and consistent, regulated power to connected devices, eliminating the drop-out and reliability issues associated with consumer-grade hubs. kramerav.com Meetings are an unavoidable and deservedly unloved aspect of office life but are they about to be transformed through the use of smart technology? Researchers at the VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland, working with partners Teleste, Helvar, ISKU, Framery, Ambientia and the University of Lapland, have developed technology that monitors interactions and behaviour in meeting rooms in real-time, enabling businesses to make adjustments to improve meeting effectiveness. The Mindful Meetings concept, implemented in collaboration with lighting control system provider Helvar and workspace design and construction company Framery, combines sensor data, artificial intelligence and behavioural analytics to monitor subtle changes in group dynamics and engagement levels. “We measure meeting room dynamics: how interaction flows, whether participants maintain attention in the meeting, how active the discussion is and how the environment – light, sound, air quality – affects it. Privacy is maintained because we don’t collect data at the individual level but analyse the group as a whole,” says Principal Scientist Johannes Peltola of VTT. The project gathers data from a variety of sources, including video-based analytics that monitor participants’ facial direction and whether they are interacting with other participants or with devices, and chair sensors that detect who is speaking and when, as well as heart rate variability. “Heart rate variability can indicate the extent to which participants are synchronised, i.e. how they adapt to each other’s interaction,” explains Peltola. “Facial direction, eye contact and changes in sitting posture reveal how actively present people are in the meeting. This helps to identify moments of passivity or situations where one person dominates the discussion.” Technology provided by Helvar analyses environmental conditions, such as lighting, air quality and presence data, and communicates to participants how the meeting is progressing through coloured lights. “The sensing space brings concrete data for organisations to use: what should be changed to make workflow better? At the same time, the solution helps evaluate meeting room utilisation rates and supports decision-making in space planning and time management,” adds Pasi Takala, Product Manager, Lighting Intelligence at Helvar. www.vttresearch.com AV Why meetings fail VTT technology identifies when and why meetings are failing Easy switching Halkin Mainframe, London upgrades BYOD meeting experience with Ashton Bentley, a Kramer company Coloured lights provide real-time feedback on meeting effectiveness
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