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Buildings Could Save Energy By Spying On Workers
Galactic_grub writes "In the future, your place of work (or apartment) may very well spy on you. But that doesn't mean it'll be able to name and shame you for all your nasty habits. Researchers at Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratory (MERL) have devised a 'dumb' surveillance system that monitors the movements of workers without identifying them individually. The idea is to have a computer system automatically configure the air-conditioning to save money, or illuminate the most appropriate escape signs in an emergency."
This is the most optimistic writing on infrared motion detectors I've read in a long, long time.
-Rob
Biblical fiscal responsibility
Which is why you don't work at MERL. In large, complex buildings, having only the signs that lead you out of the building in the quickest possible way would definitely be a benefit. Especially if, for example, one particular exit route was blocked for any reason.
An old-timer with old-timey ideas.
I hope by "appropriate" they mean if a building is on fire and one of the escape routes like a stairwell is on fire, it will redirect them to a safer place.
Exactly.
I mean, in most emergencies I can think of (flood, earthquake, tornado, whatever), you can pretty much bet on something being, you know, _damaged_. What if it's a sensor, or one of the hubs for this monitoring thing, or whatever? I can easily imagine someone getting lost, or trapped because they were too slow to evacuate, or end up with a stampede, just because the computer thought there was noone on that floor.
Heck, common sense says that something will be damaged even if nothing goes wrong. E.g., an escape sign will have a burned lightbulb. If the one at the other end of the corridor does light up, maybe I'll see that one.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
How in the hell is this spying? All they are doing is taking a rough estimate of the number of people in the room and adjusting the AC/heat (and I did RTFA). No tracking. No identification of individuals.
It sounds to me like this story got trumped up with a privacy scare to get some reads.
Per Square Mile, a blog about density
Still too failure-prone. What if the sensors are responding but buggy and they actively tell the signs to be off? A major disaster requiring evacuation could cause all sorts of things to go wrong.
The most robust systems are usually the most simple.
Well, the concept is bullshit. If they can spy on you they will. Period.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
The biggest problem, IMHO, with emergency evacuation is a little fact that is often overlooked: people tend towards exits with which they are familiar. If you have two main exits and four emergency exits which trigger an alarm, nearly all people will automatically take the two main exits because they are comfortable entering and leaving the building through those entrances and exits. The four emergency exits will almost never get used. The only exception is a situation where you have to pass right by the emergency exit to get to the main exit, and even then, most people will be reluctant to use the emergency exit.
Similarly, stairs that culminate in an emergency exit door will almost never get used because people usually won't use them to get between floors and can't use them to enter or leave the building. As a result, only a small percentage of people will know where they are, and even fewer will know those stairs well enough to take them in an emergency. The rest will be too afraid of getting turned around and going the wrong way.
Making this even funnier is the corollary: nearly every alarm resulting from use of emergency exits is a false alarms. (A large percentage are either A. shoplifters at department stores or B. small children.) That makes the automatic alarm a complete waste of resources. You are far better off with a normal door and a pull handle.
What does this mean for emergency preparedness? Simple: you should NEVER have an entrance or exit that is "for emergency use only" unless it leads to an unsafe area such as a rooftop. All exits should be clearly marked and USED REGULARLY. Workers should be encouraged to frequent the entry/exit stairs closest to their offices/cubicles whenever possible, and to enter and leave the building through the most direct route, which by definition means that the most direct route cannot have one of those stupid "alarm will sound" bars on it.
If every emergency entrance and exit were turned into a normal entrance/exit with a pull handle and were used in the normal course of entering and leaving buildings, the typical time to evacuate a building in the event of an emergency would drop dramatically. If you'd like to take the easiest possible step towards making your workplace safer and you have an emergency management team at your workplace, point this out to them, and ask them why safe entrances and exits are marked as being for emergency use only. If they can't answer that question, ask that they change the doors into normal entrances and exits, then continue to nag them at every opportunity until they do so. You may not successfully change anything, but at least you'll get them thinking about the problem.
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30 seconds at $20/h can add up. 30 seconds is about 0.83% of a hour or $0.166/h (at $20/h) which amounts to 16.6 cents every hour (assuming the person is required to turn off a light once a day). A building with 500 employees would be caught paying the 500 employees $83 total for their time turning off the lights, that's just in a single day. [/idiot]
Some days I just get bored and Troll post all the memes I can think of...
You know, If they had a proper zone control on the cooling/heating systems, it would seem as if it already changes the cooling loads depending on the number of people present. If you set the thermostat to 72 degrees, and the temperature is 72 degrees, wouldn't it still be 72 degrees with 1 or 500 people present?