Building Description Language (BDL)—An Innovative Solution for Surveying Facilities

A research team led by Professor Timothy Wong, Faculty of Applied Sciences & Technology, was presented with the challenge to survey all the washroom facilities at a large campus building. Information sought through the survey was the location and the internal configurations related to the washroom stalls, urinals, sinks, soap dispensers, and hand sanitizer dispensers. Professor Timothy was assisted by Caio Cotts, a student research assistant in Humber’s Computer Engineering program.

The project originally started with the Applied Research Rapid Response to COVID-19 grant provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

Challenge

Due to the size of the campus and the irregular floor plans, the washrooms in the building were scattered all over the place. The tried-and-true way of conducting the survey would have been having a human surveyor inspect the building floors manually and record the relevant information in their notebooks. The information gathered would then be inputted into a computer.

However, such a process is prone to error due to its manual nature and potential for handwriting misinterpretation. Additionally, there can be a time lag between when the data is collected and when it is inputted into a computer. This time lag can range from days to weeks if the surveying is outsourced to a different party. Once the data is entered into a computer, a unique identifier is generated and printed on labels. When there is a human error in this manual process, it leads to missing, duplicate or incorrect labels.

Solution

To tackle this challenge, the research team designed a Building Description Language (BDL) that encompasses all the attributes of most building spaces and washroom configurations.

The solution eliminated the manual process of taking notes and made it possible for the data to be inputted directly into the computer. This innovative approach significantly eliminated the time gap between onsite data acquisition and data entry. The cloud technology also removed the requirement of an in-person surveyor as the data collected could be analyzed anywhere.

The BDL was also refined to use shorthand style labelling for ease of data entry. The project team aimed to eliminate manual notetaking by building a mobile application that takes live data input as a surveyor walks the building spaces. The data is then fed into the cloud, which means that any team member can view the relevant data regardless of their location. This solution reduces the possibility of data interpretation errors or data loss.

Looking ahead

After BDL, the research team is focusing on further analyzing the live data collected by using the same app and the cloud database. At deployment, the onsite field team goes to every washroom to stick the sensors. Most of the sensors work with no issues; however, sometimes, there is a small percentage that has issues. The previous process had the team fill in a form per sensor if there were issues to follow up on. This manual process done on paper was prone to errors and led to a time delay.

Thanks to the mobile app, this process was made more efficient as the issues could be documented in the app, which also includes the voice-to-text feature that eliminates the need to type. A major benefit of this new process was that the documentation in the app could be monitored in real-time on computers in the office.

The research team is working to further improve the process with the help of AI. The AI feature introduced in the app ‘reads’ the comments and divides them into two categories—the comments marked in red are urgent, and the ones in green are for informational purposes.

Professor Timothy shares that the team is looking forward to making further refinements to the process using technology.

Learn more about ways to get involved in research projects taking place at Humber.

We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).
Nous remercions le Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada (CRSNG) de son soutien.