Challenge

The digital divide has been a notorious issue in regional and rural Australia with a lack of infrastructure, difficult access to sites, and expensive connectivity options that are out of the reach of most. In this case, assets like electricity poles are hard to access and maintain. Their condition was largely unknown, and their maintenance was scheduled, rather than ‘as required’, making their costs inefficient.

Without a consistent way of monitoring assets and their surrounds including vegetation and water levels, natural disasters like storm damage, fire, or floods can damage remote assets and areas while going unnoticed.

Solution

Yurika was determined to address this, and with the aim to collate and understand data from various micro-climates, we set out to deploy 50 multipurpose sensors on 50 power poles in locations ranging from coastal to farmland, mountainous terrain, rainforest and wetlands.

By partnering with IoT sensor creators, Lixia, and low orbit satellite provider, FleetSpace, VirtuGrp and Yurika’s IoT Platform received a secure data feed of temperature, air pressure, humidity and pole tilt and angle, aggregated through a LoRa network connection to FleetSpace’s low orbit satellite.

Outcomes

• Remote and regional are no longer limitations for IoT deployments
• Asset health can be monitored daily, instead of maintenance on a schedule
• Potential value of assets are increased as every piece of infrastructure can become a potential site for IoT devices
• The trial focussed on electricity pole health across multiple micro-climates, however this technology can be applied to any industry
• Real-time, or near real-time data can trigger emergency response in the event of a natural disaster or emergency event

This trial, achieved in just three weeks, demonstrated we can achieve the same results anywhere – location is no longer a limitation for IoT technology deployment.