Monitoring and Management of Classroom Presentation Technology Using Crestron Fusion

Many of the learning spaces across a typical college campus are equipped with tools to aid the learning process. These tools such as projectors, microphones, and document cameras should be monitored and when needed maintained to ensure that they remain operational for classes. Analytics of classroom equipment utilization could aid more efficient maintenance schedules, and better tracking for assets. Analog methods that require manually checking each space or just waiting for repair requests are inefficient and can disrupt the learning process in the classroom. By monitoring parameters of the classroom audio video (AV) systems, usage and functional data can be collected and utilized to determine the availability, operational status, and usage of these spaces. This information can enable university employees to act proactively to complete system repairs before hardware failure occurs. By connecting the utilization data from each AV system to a central server, the information can be aggregated and analyzed. Crestron (Rockleigh, NJ, USA) provides enterprise control and automation solutions for AV equipment. One of their products provides for system monitoring across a large network of AV equipped spaces. This product is Crestron Fusion, and it enables monitoring of connected systems, scheduling of services such as repairs and enabling of alerts for AV technicians. The purpose of this project is to utilize the Crestron Fusion service to track information about a room's AV system, such as lamp hours, microphone battery levels, and room occupancy. This information would be saved to a centralized database and would be available for analytics, monitoring, and generation of alerts when needed. Such a system would improve the ability to monitor classrooms' operational status, maintenance cycles, and appropriate usage.