Smart passersby monitoring for mobility and crowd control management.
Mobility is a fundamental concern in urban, commercial and industrial areas. Having information about how people move in these environments improves mobility policies and organization.
Most solutions offer an occupation control, based on entrance and exit monitoring or total count in a certain area, but are unable to perform an individual traceability. This limitation comes both from technical and legal limitations and, when possible, is fairly complex to achieve.
However, knowing how the individuals are moving between monitored areas is a highly valuable information that in certain situations like the actual COVID-19 pandemic enables better decision making to assure more secure environments for people in all kind of areas.
The characteristics of the solution to achieve are the following:
Purple Blob has developed a mobility solution called Metis. This solution achieves most of the required characteristics, and the company is now extending the system to adapt it to the COVID-19 situation.
Metis is based on a sensor network that monitors wide areas, reporting the occupation of people in them. Moreover, the system also generates anonymous and unique identifiers of the people within their range, this allows for unique traceability of the movement between monitored zones.
Based on different technologies for both the detection of individuals and communication capabilities, the resulting system is a highly scalable solution, that can cover from malls to big cities.
The system respects the user’s privacy while remaining non-intrusive for the detected individuals, making it perfect for most use case scenarios. Lastly, for the actual COVID-19 situation, in which having information about both crowds and flow of people results in a powerful tool to avoid dangerous situations, Purple Blob is extending the system with thermal cameras. These cameras will detect potential infection threats and link this information with the identifiers that pass though the monitored zone, enabling an analysis of the potential risk to assist pandemic professionals.
Summarizing the solution characteristics:
For urban and rural environments , offers information about how and when are the citizens moving. This information can be used to detect crowdy or underused urban areas, necessity of new public transportation stations, effect of disruptive situations like construction sites and many other mobility problematics.
For commercial and industrial cases , the system offers information about crowdy areas and relation of attractiveness of certain locations. As an example, knowing how much people passes through a certain location can be used to set the value of the placement of a commerce.
Lastly, in healthcare situations like the actual COVID-19 pandemic, the solution can detect dangerous crowd situations, tag potential infection sources and monitor their flow between different zones, enabling a data-based risk control assessment.
In conclusion, the solution offers the following returns:
