ICT and Environmental Monitoring

How does environmental monitoring effect ICT?

The environment can be monitored for different reasons for instance; rivers and soil can be monitored for pollution, public buildings also need monitoring as they need to know how many people are inside, in case an emergency etc.

         

• Sensors can be located in or around a room; each sensor monitor a different condition, for example; temperature, smoke, floodwater, humidity, main power etc.

• Tracking people as they move around the shopping centre is also important because of many reasons such as; knowing how successful the centre is, mapping the routes people take which will show where the most popular areas are; to be able to do this some trolleys and baskets have fitted sensors which detect where you go.

• Another reason is finding how long visitors say and making sure there aren’t too many visitors due to safety. There used to be a traditional way of counting people which was to use a light beam which censored and counted the amount of people. However the problem with this method is that if two people walk through together it will only be counted as one.

• Commercial food growers need to control the climate of their crops; you can test for this using heat sensors which turns heaters on and off or opens air vents if too hot. The moisture of the soil needs to stay moist; by using the watering systems it can be turned on and off.