CLIMATE CHANGE:
The system adjusts temperatures based on eyelid movement that suggests sleepiness
LONDON: The effects of climate change mean the world can expect higher temperatures and more frequent heat waves, climate experts have warned, with poor communities likely to be worst affected.
Heat is neglected because it is both an invisible and hard-to-document disaster that claims lives largely behind closed doors, they said, and because hot weather does not strike many people as a serious threat.
The warning comes as hot weather has swept the northern hemisphere.
Britain has sweltered in a prolonged heat wave, with temperatures set to test national records, the country’s Meteorological Office said.
“We will have to get used to these kinds of summers,” said Friederike Otto of Oxford University.
“There is no doubt that there is a link to climate change. We need to take heat waves seriously around the TOKYO: Japanese office workers hoping to nod off on the job may need to sleep with one eye open thanks to a new system that can detect snoozers and blast them with cold air.
Air-conditioning manufacturer Daikin and electronics giant NEC said on Thursday they have begun trialling the system, which monitors the movement of the employee’s eyelids with a camera attached to a computer. The computer can automatically lower the room’s temperature if it detects dozing at desks. “We hope to introduce this system commercially in 2020,” a Daikin spokesman said.
The system uses Daikin’s technology to automatically adjust temperatures and NEC’S facial recognition technology to monitor different types of eyelid movement world as something that we need to adapt to,” Otto said.
Fires have also caused devastation in Greece, Sweden and the United States. The past three years were the hottest on record, the United Nations’ World Meteorological Organization said in March.
The World Health Organization says heat stress, linked to climate change, is likely to cause 38,000 extra deaths a year worldwide between that suggest sleepiness.
It was developed after an initial study done by the companies on how best to keep people alert. They tried lowering temperatures by a few degrees, increasing brightness and spraying aromas in a room while participants did simple maths for about an hour. “Our study proved that lowering temperature is 2030 and 2050. Two weeks into Japan’s blistering heat wave, at least 80 people have died and thousands have been rushed to emergency rooms, as officials urged citizens to stay indoors to avoid temperatures exceeding 40 degrees Celsius (104°F) in some areas.
In a heat wave in May, more than 60 people died in Karachi, Pakistan, when the temperature rose above 40C (104F). effective... especially when the early signs of sleepiness are detected,” the companies said in a joint statement.
And in news likely to provide cold comfort to Japan’s infamously overworked salarymen, Daikin hopes to eventually develop airconditioners that can direct cool blasts to specific snoozing workers.