Open-plan office distributed sensitivity-adaptive disturbance alerting system

This idea is to counteract the disturbance encountered in open-plan ofices of people nearby having distracting, sometimes personal, conversations. I'm proposing an over-engineered technology solution to this problem rather than just going and telling these people to be quiet because:

o I'm sometime guilty of the same thing and people in glass houses, etc.
o It would be a bit too confrontational, especially for us English
o This is the Halfbakery

To use this, you would set a little "sensitivity to disturbance" slider on your computer which you would obviously set "High" when you are working hard. With everyone's input, the server software behind this would then be able to create a map of sensitivity for your floor. Then, using the microphones in every computer, the server builds a "noise map" of the floor and identifies desks with a relative high noise level, once ambient noise from airconditioning, etc. have been taken into account. IR transponders built into employee ID badges (as already used in some workplaces) are used to identify where these noise hotspots correlate with more than one employee being near a desk.

Where these potential sources of disturbance overlap with high areas of noise sensitivity from the sensitivity map, the system will subtly interrupt the conversation. Obviously you don't want to use sound for this interruption, instead I propose that motorised rollers in the computer's mouse are used to make the mouse move in little, distracting, circles on the mousepad - bigger circles for bigger disturbances of course.


[5 years today!]