Stepping into St. Luke elderly care center, everything seems quite normal, like any regular elderly care center, but you somehow feel more calm and secure. Being one of the early adopters of smart solutions, every step you take in the care center, you can find something different, something innovative. Behind all the new technologies, are the developer SCT and the IoT Platform Tuya Smart that have worked in partnership to introduce new ideas to the elderly care field.
As a traditional LED brand, Smart Control Technology (SCT) witnessed the golden age of the LED market, and relished its market share in Singapore to the Southeast Asia region. Recently SCT announced its involvement in smart business, by successfully launching its smart healthcare, smart education, and smart car park solutions to serve the local markets with the convenience and ease of controlling all devices you use on a daily basis. And by partnering with Tuya Smart, it took them just months to complete.
Founded as a lighting solutions provider for the Southeast Asian market in 1997, SCT built its early success in the LED lighting category. The team found great demand in both the business and consumer market, and soon counted organizations such as China’s Chang Chun Airport and Singapore’s Housing Development Board as some of its major clients.
But the company is not yet fully satisfied with its success.
Time to Break Out of the Mode
“We always believe there is going to be something new, or even disruptive, in the LED industry,” said Richard Chua, Co-Founder and Director of SCT. Recognizing the LED industry has reached its peak, the company never stopped looking for its next recipe for growth.
In 2017, the SCT team went to a trade fair and everything changed. “We realized an opportunity of becoming an IoT provider, by observing the trend at the fair where factories start to label themselves as smart, connected, and IoT-based. We thought it was a great idea to connect devices together and bring the comfort and security that people would look for,” said Chua.
By the end of 2020, in only 10 months, SCT sold 15,000 smart products through its e-commerce platform on Lazada Singapore, covering smart light bulbs, socket power plugs, IR blasters, and motion sensors.
Being an early adopter, and the provider of a suite of smart home devices, the company also wins its opportunities in the commercial market from retail to healthcare. Today, SCT offers smart solutions to over 70 smart projects, including over 10 smart retail shops, 50 smart living spaces, five smart offices, a smart elderly care center, a smart school, and one smart hospital.
Upgrading the Healthcare and Elderly Care Industries Isn’t Easy
For existing, traditional elderly care centers, maintaining devices in every corner of the building, managing the energy control, and securing efficient operations are big challenges. Worst still, the high demand for full-time staff to guarantee 7/24 care for the elderly increases costs and challenges to business efficiencies in the healthcare industry.
This is a tremendous, booming market. Smart devices in Singapore household penetration will be 11.3% in 2021 and is expected to hit 33.9% by 2025 according to Statista, and in business scenarios, it’s the same situation.
However big the market is, there is still a chance that most businesses can’t find the right way in.
A Smart Company Emerges in the Blink of an Eye
It was after the meeting Tuya at the trade fair when SCT realized to step into something completely new wouldn’t be easy unless they find an established partner to guide the way.
“Understanding the business wouldn’t be easy for a beginner like us,” commented Chua. “From designing the products with connection methods, to creating an app, and understanding the cloud service, it’s a high threshold for most business, and many result in failure.”
It’s important to work with the right partner.
For SCT, the answer was Tuya.
Through Tuya’s platform, SCT provides its clients a full suite of smart hardware, selecting from Tuya’s 310,000 product SKUs. Also, it leverages Tuya’s Smart Life app to control all the devices. “It becomes so easy for us to choose from Tuya’s mature ecosystem, and the products are fast to develop through Tuya’s supply chain. It provides abundant choices for different scenarios, as well as cloud services and app control, all-in-one. We are providing the clients more than we could have imagined,” states Chua.
Tuya Smart is a leading global IoT Cloud Platform that provides developers with a one-stop IoT PaaS-level solution containing hardware development tools, global cloud services, and smart business platform development, offering comprehensive ecosystem empowerment from technology to marketing channels. The platform has smart-enabled more than 310,000 device SKUs. Now, smart devices ‘Powered by Tuya’ are available in more than 220 countries and regions in over 100,000 stores all over the world.
SCT’s client, like St. Luke’s elderly care, rests peacefully at night with the cameras, sensors, and light dimmers, creating a calming and safer atmosphere. While in the daytime, it looks after the elderly living in the facility with full automation and alerts. The devices are interconnected, and can alert the staff if anyone falls, accesses a restricted area, or other worrisome situations. Through multiple protocols like Zigbee, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Mesh, IR, regardless of which, they are well connected from indoor households to the outdoor areas of a hospital, from the floors, rooms, corridors, and even bathrooms.
And besides lighting, sensors, and other devices, SCT also has the energy consumption, device maintenance, and space utilization analysis under control without the necessity of having its staff running around from different control centers to each unit in the building, to look after the status of each device.
Always Think About What’s Next
Mr. Chua commented in a recent speech, “we want to give special thanks to Tuya Smart, who helped us quickly transform our lighting business to a complete IoT provider. We have gained more market share in many areas that we have not ever entered in the past.”
SCT now aims at the Car Park market, and more scenarios that could be smart. The entire Southeast Asian market has excellent growth points in many verticals that are yet to be transformed, from agriculture, retail, real estate, tourism, and energy.
Under the waves of upgrades and transformation, more businesses like SCT already find their right partner in Tuya. SCT is just the first brand in Singapore to partner with Tuya, and there’s more coming every day.
As the Singapore government made a $2B annual procurement under the Smart Nation Initiative since 2017 and partnered with the industry players, it is obvious that the government is determined to accelerate delivering digital services to its citizens and businesses. This is just being part of Singapore’s Smart Nation efforts, which leaves lofty expectations for a company like SCT to explore.
According to SCT, they have immense confidence in all the potential industries that are yet to be transformed with smart technology. They are confident because they are, indeed, already on their way.
https://iotbusinessvantage.medium.com/smart-control-technology-trailblazed-the-smart-lighting-market-sets-sights-on-the-health-care-fd6c0c10f884