BIMprove utilizes many technologies that are relatively new when it comes to use in the construction industry. In this article we investigate the interest (worldwide) as estimated by search trends numbers on Google search.
They do not present the absolute number of searches done per term, but rather present a timeline where 100 always is the highest search per time unit in the period the graph shows. The reason this is relevant is that by utilizing technologies that are getting increasing interest, it is more likely that the BIMprove system will get interest when we present it to the market. The terms we look at the trends for below are “Building Information Modelling”, “Digital Twin”, “Autonomous Drone/Robot”, “Point Cloud” and “Machine learning”.
Google trends for searches last 10 years (1st Feb 2012 to 1st Feb 2022).
Figure 8 Google Trends search for the term “Building Information Modelling”
As shown by Fig. 8 the trend for the term “Building Information Modelling” had a steady increase until around 2019 or 2020, and then it stabilized. We chose that term instead of “BIM” since the latter gave unrelated search matches.
Figure 9 Google Trends search for the term “Digital Twin”
Fig. 9 shows that the interest in the term “Digital Twin” was stable until 2017, and after that it has had a strong increase.
Figure 10 Google Trends search for the term “Autonomous Robot” and “Autonomous Drone”
The search trends for “Autonomous Robot” / “Autonomous Drone” (robot alternative in blue) indicate that the first of them has more awareness, or maybe that the word “drone” in itself indicates some autonomy.
Figure 11 Google Trends search for the term “Point cloud”
The trend for search the term “Point cloud” is shown in Fig. 11. It indicates that the interest has slowly increased over time. At the same time, the cost of equipment to capture point clouds via laser scanning has fallen significantly. This has probably contributed to increased interest and searches. There has also been a long-term improvement in the software generate point clouds from a set of photos (“photogrammetry”).
Figure 12 Google trends for the search term “Machine learning”
There has been a strong increase in the search activity for the term “Machine learning”, as is shown in Fig. 12.
The search trends above indicate an increasing interest in the key technologies BIMprove is utilizing. We believe that this can be a positive contribution in the market, for further research initiatives and for standardization.
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