Buildings Could Save Energy By Spying On Workers 195
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."
Emergencies? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Emergencies? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, you claim that... (Score:2)
I think you'll also find that in many places, all emergency exits are legally required to be marked/illuminated in specific ways.
Of course, if one actually _reads_ the article, there is no mention of this at all - it's all an ill-conceived figment of the article submitter's imagination, which BTW, was headlined to be about "energy savings."
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Most buildings I have had dealings with have outright replaced the systems every ten years or so because it is cheaper then checking batteries and bulbs and all. During the periodic fire marshal's inspection, whenever something obvious like these don't work or fire extinguishers past their certification date or even out of range will cause the inspection to go from a routine walk through to a thorou
Re:Emergencies? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Emergencies? (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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For Exteme Super Safety you add a second PLC looking at the a second set of contacts in the safety cord. If at any time both PLCs don't agree, the machine stops.
This kind of setup
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I mean seriously, Unless your in a position to instruct everyone about the workings as well as the dangers and account for most every situation, it isn't really a good Idea. The d
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If one is blocked by fire, shut the lights off so people don't attempt to go that way. Use standard redundant wiring for it, to include test sensors to tell you when the thing goes bad.
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When we don't need these and stop paying attention because some other system is
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Nobody in the right mind would let a progra
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And what do you propose for the very large population of color blind people?
You think that's bad? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Emergencies? (Score:5, Insightful)
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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Well, one more issue, Stairs and corridors that are rarely used tend to be haunted by seedy people who are prone to illegal acts. Rape, muggings and random violence seems to happen in these pl
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As far as the staffing goes, those issues can be easily handled by badge access doors, just like most businesses do for after hours access. With respect to the seedy characters outside the doors waiting to mug you... yikes! Fnd a job in a safer neighborhood. :-)
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Well, to be honest, that situation wasn't there when it all began. It happened over the course of about 3-5 years. After the second rape and probably the 15th mugging with the cops unable to do something about it, the land owners in the area banded together and started buying the residential houses behind the area and bulldozing them to create a large parking lot.
I'm sure this not only displaced innocent people but moved the problems somewhere else so they didn't hav
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I know this because in the fa
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I do. I've talked to some of the emergency management folks where I work. I believe that one or two percent is a highball estimate, and a real-world guess is more like half a percent. If the main steps were only big enough to handle half of the building, roughly half of the occupants of the building would burn to death, and frankly, that's being optimistic.
Those building codes definitely should be rethought. Desperately. Fortunately, at least in our case, we are still able to evacuate relatively quic
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Except if the route with the lit signs is also the route that is blocked.
Also, most large office buildings house a lot of people, if everyone just went out what some algorithm considered the quickest door there would be a huge bottleneck in that exit. Generally the plan is to make use of each and every available exit.
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Um, the building is on fire, or in an earth quake, flood, hurricane or what ever, it isn't working properly and is about to fall down. Are you going to trust that these signs will works as said? I doubt they'd work quite that well.
What we really nee
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Re:Emergencies? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Such systems could use their knowledge of where groups congregate to turn down the air conditioning when there are only a few people in one part of the building, for example. In an emergency, electronic signs could direct people to the nearest available escape route when one becomes congested.
Low-tech signs to indicate all exit methods. High tech signs to indicate the best exit method, taking into account that there are 200 people trying to jam their way out the closest exit, and one
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Exactly (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Extra complexity (Score:2)
The simplest "emergency exit" sign can be always lit, and have a battery backup that kicks in if the power goes down. It's a trivial circuit.
Now enter such complex monitoring schemes. How _do_ you know you've covered all possible scenarios? What if power didn't go down, but one of the motion sensors is on the fritz and doesn't detect movement any more, for example? You can design complex challenge-response protocols and all sorts of smart self-diagnostics, but that's even more co
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nothing about any uses (Score:2)
Well as long as the relay to turn on the new sign is NOT nearby also
Does the system come with a gas detector to tell it not to turn on/off any lights etc during a suspected gas leak like the gas company says?
Hmm it would either disable itself and not help you or possibly blow you up trying to help, oops.
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The big (unanswered ) question tho.
Did it save enough to pay for the system and the 215 sensor
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It's the age old question:
If a tree falls in a forest, and no one's there to hear it, does it make a sound.
In the same breath, I would probably wait on that until the other modes of operation are proven effective (and not something remeniscient of 1984).
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Blinking the most-appropriate exit path would be appropriate, so long as in the worst-case they failsafe to steady On.
Already exists (Score:5, Interesting)
and according to the company, its dropped costs by a third.
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We have something similar except that the normal light switches shut themselves off at a particular time, and you just have to switch them back on after about thirty seconds. I think it's some sort of weird latching relay design.
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The key difference in the arti
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You mean like, oh I don't know, THERMOSTATS? With all due respect, I work in commercial real estate engineering, and we run a 1,000,000 sq ft campus with 6 buildings, all of whic
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For example, NYS code specifies minimal outside air ventilatiion rates, based on either CFM per person or CFM per square foot, depending on the type of space. Outside air usually
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Re:Already exists (Score:4, Funny)
In my current building the restrooms are wired with motion sensors but if you have to sit still and concentrate for longer than 5 minutes the lights go out. Unfortunately that's somewhat distracting from the business at hand and I suspect that the energy saved is probably offset by the length of time the lights going off extends your visit to the restroom. I suppose that could be resolved by mandating that all employees have Keloggs Prune Bran for breakfast...
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The offices used by senior management have PIR activated lights. Invariably they wind up sitting in the dark after a while so I make a point of dropping in on the boss from time to time and waving my arms around to put the light back on the subject.
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Mine too, but ours is motion activated. However, sometimes the sensors go bad and the lights go out even though people are there. Multiple people have to go and do the YMCA dance or the Macarana to trigger the motion sensors. We sometimes joke that people aren't working hard enough to trigger the motion sensors and that management uses them as productivity detectors.
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It would not be hard to design a system that says "It's cool enoguh outside, and it's too hot indoors, so I'm going to open vents and run the fans without running the compressor." It would only need to run the compressor if it needed to rapidly bring the temperature down for a human inhabitant. Otherwise, it could slowly dissipate much of the excess heat throughout the night without using much energy.
Emergency (Score:2)
There's no "or" in an emergency. I thought all exit signs are appropriate.
Unless of course a fire damaged some backup batteries, and the system must act smart and determine the best route to maximize the number of survivors.
About this summary and article... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Very olde worlde tech (Score:2)
It also worked as a security lighting system, turning on the lights one the few occasions the place was "visited".
I'm sorry Dave (Score:5, Funny)
You'll just have to pee in the dark, Dave.
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Nothing to see (Score:3, Interesting)
Depending on how you want to think about it, it was funny or inevitable or symbolic that the robotic takeover did not start at MIT, NASA, Microsoft or Ford. It started at a Burger-G restaurant in Cary, NC on May 17, 2010. It seemed like such a simple thing at the time, but May 17 marked a pivotal moment in human history.
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After all, our current human overlords are doing a terrible job. Let's give the robots a shot at it.
Spying? (Score:5, Insightful)
It sounds to me like this story got trumped up with a privacy scare to get some reads.
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Didn't you ever watch Sneakers? You can correlate IR data to individuals quite easily based on another data point such as an individual's arrival or departure to the building (perhaps even passing a security camera at the entrance). :)
Or more interesting, you can identify individuals by their patterns of
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Doctors And Nurses Spy on Patients
In obvious breach of the privacy of sick people, doctors and nurses have been asking questions, observing vital signs and recording the data on charts. Some have been going so far as to take samples of blood and other body fluids and tissues and taking these away to unknown "labs" for analysis.
These behaviours were defended by doctors as "necessary to ensure accurate diagnosis and to allow proper theraputic responses".
But we're having NONE of it. LEAVE SICK PEO
We'll need this in the future (Score:2)
(I know.. I know.. sixth day was a crap movie).
Paranoid? (Score:2)
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Tracking vs. Detecting (Score:2)
If course that makes it sound like decades old tech and not worth the time to write up *wink*
M5 (Score:2)
Sounds like M5 [wikipedia.org]. Let's just be careful whose engrams are used!
just don't put it in the sever room (Score:2)
spying indeed! (Score:2)
How is this "Spying"? (Score:2)
Already exists..? (Score:2)
Biggest problem with a system like this, though, is that if people are not moving around (working while sitting down), the lights go out causing much annoyance.
I see that the new thing is that the sensors & software are able to differentiate between a person walking in a straight line, people split
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It's kind of neat, but doesn't seem very useful.. and could be easily achieved by a system that is not centralized (scan for heat signatures with IR - if found, keep the light/AC turned on, otherwise - turn off)
I hope it works better than the one we were using (Score:2)
Basically, if a handful of people were working into the evening or on a weekend, they wouldn't provide sufficient input to the system. After 30 minutes of no movement in the hallways, the system would assume irresponsible workers had vacated the building, leaving the lights
Redundent? (Score:3, Insightful)
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That is unless they are planning on installing undersized air conditioners and kicking more on when more people are present. But I don't really see a big savings there either. At least not one that would compensate for the added monitoring and
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It takes more energy to cool a room down to a temperature then it does to maintain that temperature with modern air conditioners. Adding 100 ninety eight degree heat sources(bodies) to the room would only make it worse.
Do you have a source for this? It seems to violate some basic theories of the carnot cycle/heat transfer (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnot_cycle / http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_conduction [wikipedia.org]).
If I want to keep a room at 68 degrees for today and some day 100 years for now, but I don't care about anything in between, your statement suggests that it's cheaper to leave the air conditioner thermostat set at 68 degrees for every day for 100 years than it is to run it for 2 days (today and the day 100 years
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It is the
Lights out! (Score:2)
On the other hand the system they are talking about sounds a bit spooky if overzealous. Might be necessary, though some offices I've been in they try to get you out because otherwise the heating would have to be kicked in and cost more money..
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That's like going into my storage unit for ten minutes, usually with boxes piled up in front of the entrance.
TFA: >or illuminate the most appropriate escape signs in an emergency.
We need Plastic Man to do the reach on this one.
Reminds me of the Clamp Building (Score:2)
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And you still have some degree of privacy in that it's not detecting that you are in the building, but that something warm is in the building which might like to have lights.
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They generally work by using an array of Fresnel lenses to focus IR onto two opto-sensors, which form the bottom half of a Wheatstone bridge {the top half is two simple fixed resistances}. The voltage output from the bridge will normally be stable. However, if the infrared image changes, one or t
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That's why you don't make the fan system tied to occupancy, merely the heating/AC portion. The fan should always run at least periodically if you have tightly sealed rooms like that. Of course, realistically, you almost never have rooms that are so tightly sealed from the rest of the building, either.
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