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Our garage door kept getting left open. A reminder wasn't the fix.

In short

From inside the house, nobody could see whether the garage door was open. Now a camera and an AI model on a computer in the house announce it on the speakers when the garage is empty and a door has been open too long. In a business, I ask the same thing: is it a people problem, or is the information somewhere they can't see it?

Our garage door stays open more often than my wife and I would like. The obvious fix is for someone to remind us or the kids. That fails for the same reason the door gets left open in the first place, because it depends on somebody remembering.

So I reflected on why it kept happening. The answer was: from inside the house you can't see whether the door is open.

That made the job small. A camera in the garage watches the doors, and an AI model running on a computer in our house works out whether a door is open, whether the lights are on and which cars are home. When the garage is empty and a door has been open too long, the house speakers say so every so often until someone closes it. The camera is blocked from the internet, so the video never leaves the house.

I ask the same question in businesses. When something keeps getting missed, is it really a people problem, or is the information somewhere they can't see it? Often it's the second one, and the fix is getting the information to where the work happens.

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