“If I sit at my desk and I don’t move, after 15 minutes the lights go out. Some offices are like that,” says Thomas Little, a BU professor of electrical and computer engineering and associate director of the Lighting Enabled Systems & Applications Engineering Research Center (LESA ERC). In another annoying scenario, if Little was to leave his office it would take 15 minutes of wasted energy before the lights go out. Motion sensing doesn’t cut it when it comes to occupant tracking. It must leave an inefficient amount of time between the last sensed movement and turning the lights off in order to account for ‘stillness.’ Even then it will inevitably plunge you in to darkness if you are too still for too long. There is no right amount of time for lights to stay on to suit every situation, nor can we rely on motion to recognize occupancy. The smart solution is occupancy […]