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Clever? Smart Street Lamps Light Up Only When Needed

Motion-activated lighting products aren’t anything new. They’re presently used in indoor environments, such as the hallways of hotels and by eco-conscious homeowners. Adapting the sensor technology for outdoor use, however, meant coming up with a much more sophisticated variation that can not only simply detect movement, but also distinguish between insignificant stirrings, such as the rustling of trees and the scampering of stray cats crossing the road.

“It's psychologically beautiful because the system never turns the lights off, it's designed to just dim them, it's still bright enough for people to have good visibility while effective enough to achieve excellent cost savings.”

Chintan Shah,CEO

Inside each street post-mounted unit is an array of eight different sensors, a combination Shah calls the “secret sauce,” that have been synchronized to not only recognize the unique contours of human-generated actions, but also relay signals across the chain of street lights so that only those within the vicinity of any activity brighten.

By Tuan C. Nguyen

First published on December 24, 2013

From: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/clever-smart-street-lamps-light-up-only-when-needed-180948279/?no-ist