Face and Fingerprint Scanners on Construction Sites—Awesome or Over the Top?

If the words “Country Garden” bring to mind cottages, flowers and old ladies with tea, you need to rearrange your vernacular to include sleek, sci-fi spec technology.

Apart from having an unusual name for a construction company, Country Garden, has just installed a finger print scanning, face reading security system at one of its sites in Dongguan (a city in China’s Guangdong province).

Administrator of the project, Ou Peikang, said it’s not just the security system that’s high tech.

“On-site casting is directly controlled by cement pumps, so there is no need for workers to lug around huge bags of cement and other construction materials. There isn’t too much heavy manual work.”

All the construction materials have QR codes which workers can scan with their smartphones to find data sheets with all the info they might need. A worker on the site, Mr. Wang, elaborated on the aspects of the site he loved most:

“The entrance area is inlaid with grooves so vehicles can be washed and cleaned by an automated car wash and the accompanying spraying and aspirating systems. A digital screen, also located in the entrance area, displays the current weather information, including PM2.5, PM10 and humidity, constantly monitoring the environment within the site.”

Sidebar: If you don’t know what he means by PM2.5 and PM10, take a knee. If you do, feel free to skip this paragraph and move on. PM stands for Particle Matter and refers to particulates suspended in the air. PM2.5 is fine matter and PM10 is ultrafine. These are the things that get into your lungs, and even into your blood, and have the potential to cause all sorts of damage. Australia has quite strict regulations surrounding air pollution. However, the allowable limits in China are significantly higher.

Because we all need more acronyms in our lives, the tech they used is a form of Standard and Shareable Geospatial Foundation (SSGF). SSGF is to construction what open source software is to programming. Vice President of the Dongguan and Shenzhen sector of Country Garden, Sun Jun, explained:

“The solutions employ some of the existing established construction technologies in China while adding in several technologies from Japan and Europe. They can fully eliminate the need for plastering and significantly reduce the use of lumber, sand, cement and water while maximizing efficiencies in terms of human resources, allowing for energy conservation and environmental protection.”

Country Garden claims their process has been so streamlined you can barely tell the building is under construction. The self-elevating climbing frames are barely visible and kind of make it look like the buildings are being 3D printed rather than built. It has reduced the number of workers they need on site and, while the tech is cutting-edge, it is apparently easy to learn.