Tracking the number of people in a building is important if you want to ultimately better control energy use, facilities planning, and security. So far, most of the attempts essentially monitor where people are in a building and how they move within it.
But the occupants of a building of any type aren’t static. They do move within and also into and out of the facility. If a campus property, there is also consideration of how people shift from one building to another. Vendor R-Zero announced that it has bidirectional counting at entry and exit points, “providing granular, real-time data on occupancy and utilization at the floor, building, and portfolio levels,” the company said in a press release.
The company says that the additional information gathered helps owners, operators, facility and energy managers, real estate teams — and presumably occupiers — information to help optimize space use, reduce costs, increase asset value, and also provide additional value to tenants.
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As the company says, and as GlobeSt.com has seen in previous reporting, using technology to monitor occupancy and usage data has typically focused on a variety of techniques to capture knowledge in interiors. That can include sensors under seats, proximity sensors, infrared scanning for heat, Wi-Fi usage, or badge monitoring. That doesn’t necessarily capture the full dynamics of how a building is used, which can “fail to account for critical factors such as entry/exit times and peak utilization.”
A white paper from the company says that entry and exit counting avoids more traditional collection methods that tend to require assumptions, such as estimating a number of square feet per seat and worker assignments to know who is where. A company might have a number of assigned and unassigned desks, assuming a given utilization rate and not how frequently employees show up — an intrinsic problem in a world of hybrid working. Counting badges, for example, might lead to inaccurate weekly utilization rates by checking “show-up” rates and not more complex patterns.
By monitoring the movement of people into and out of a facility, it’s easier to get more accurate usage data. The systems employ anonymous people counting sensors for real-time historical occupancy levels. The information can help both building owners and tenants with more economic use of occupancy monitoring and lowered costs of HVAC and lighting through dynamic control in response to usage conditions.
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