According to a survey conducted by Amerisleep, a mattress company based in Scottsdale, Ariz, one in five employees reported sleeping at work. The survey which was conducted in May 2018 revealed that as many as seventy percent of tech workers – the highest among all surveyed – admitted to sleeping during work hours and reported spending more than 11 percent of their workday sleeping. The second spot was taken by the construction industry which reported 68 percent employees sleeping on the job.
Air conditioning manufacturer Daikin and electronics giant NEC have found a strange yet highly-effective method to counter this problem. 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.
So, if the office workers in Japan nod off on the job, they might be blasted with cold air. “We hope to introduce this system commercially in 2020,” a Daikin spokesman told AFP, adding that a trial had begun this month.
The system will use Daikin’s technology to automatically adjust temperatures and NEC’s facial recognition technology to monitor different types of eyelid movement that suggest sleepiness. The system was developed after the companies had conducted a study on how best to keep people alert.
They had lowered the temperatures by a few degrees, increased the brightness and sprayed the aromas in the room while participants did simple maths for about an hour. “Our study proved that lowering temperature is effective… especially when the early signs of sleepiness are detected,” the companies said in a joint statement.
The company, however, hopes to develop air conditioners that can direct cool blasts to specific snoozing workers.
