From Hour to Minute: Non-technical Challenges for Measuring Office Space Utilization with Smart Technologies

Space utilization data can reveal patterns in space usage, and employees' and customers' presence and occupants' mobility within the building. Nowadays, emerging technology, such as smart sensors and devices, can revolutionize the field which was originally dominated by the judgment of a human observer registered with paper and pencil. However, these novel instruments are often used in an old fashion, which restricts the exploitation of their full potential. This study sheds new light on the benefits and limits of smart technology in measuring space utilization, and discuss the challenges and opportunities in analyzing space utilization data measured by smart sensors, through the case study of a bank located in Verona, Italy. First, we reviewed the most relevant literature regarding common methods and previous studies about office space utilization. Then, we carefully evaluated the 18 meeting rooms’ space utilization data obtained from the bank, and compute the space utilization result based on two methods with different granularity. Our result shows that the number of occupied hours calculated at an hour level is 1.44 hour larger than the number of occupied hours calculated at a minute level. As both result reveals the concept of space utilization, which is the amount of time space was occupied, this paper revealed a gap between two space utilization calculation methods, and further discussed the issues and challenges for future space utilization data analysis and benchmarking.