Environmental Impact

What you need to Know

Describe the environmental impact of intelligent systems: heating systems, traffic control, and car management systems

Intelligent Systems

Smart home tech can control your lights, heating, entertainment systems, and so on.

The important thing about answering this question at Higher is that you focus on intelligent systems - that the system uses sensors or learns your routine, not a simple switch or “non-smart” timer.

Intelligent Heating Systems

Intelligent heating systems use sensors to monitor temperature and activity in different rooms. The system could learn your preferred temperatures and routines. There’s possibly no reason to heat a room if it’s empty, so the system might use its sensors to detect the lack of movement and stop heating that room.

It might use GPS on your phone to detect that you’re on your way home from work, and switch the heating on, accordingly. Perhaps it accesses online weather data and uses that to help with controlling temperatures.

Most of these systems would also have an app so that you can control the system directly from your phone.

Intelligent Traffic Control

When driving accelerating and braking uses more fuel.

Keeping a steady speed uses less fuel, and therefore produces lower emissions.

Intelligent traffic systems use inputs like sensors and cameras to try to keep the traffic moving, lowering these emissions. Driver navigation systems can divert them around traffic jams so that they can keep a steady flow of traffic.

Car Management Systems

Individual cars have engine management technology that reduces fuel usage, and therefore emissions. Start-stop systems can shut down the engine automatically when, for example, the driver stops at traffic lights.

That reduces emissions while the car is sitting idle.

The engine re-starts automatically when the accelerator is pressed again.

The systems also use sensors to control the air/fuel ratio, ensuring an optimum mix for reducing emissions.