Berkeley Lab researcher Bruce Nordman in his office.
When is a phone not a phone? When it's serving as an occupancy sensor for energy-saving purposes. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) researcher Bruce Nordman had an idea several years ago to take advantage of existing devices in office buildings by using them for energy efficiency purposes. In the United States buildings are responsible for 73 percent of electricity consumption and about 39 percent of carbon dioxide emissions. "If a building could base its operations on people actually showing up rather than a fixed schedule, the potential for energy savings could be quite large," Nordman said. "And if you use existing devices to sense occupancy rather than wiring a dedicated sensor and maintaining it, then it's free-you don't have to spend money to save energy." Nordman details the concept of "implicit sensing"-along with an experiment to see how accurately smartphones could provide occupancy information-in a paper titled, "Using existing network infrastructure to estimate building occupancy and control plugged-in devices in user workspaces," published in the International Journal of Communication Networks and Distributed Systems this month. His co-authors were Ben Rosenblum of Berkeley Lab and researchers at the University of South Florida and the University of Puerto Rico. The paper examines several ways that existing infrastructure that could be used for occupancy sensing, including calls made on telephone landlines, communications data collected by routers and Wi-Fi access points to measure the presence of smartphones and computers, and security badging systems.
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