Counting people during lockdown – meet RapidLab People Counter

With sensors that monitor traffic, it’s possible to react quickly in places where there are too many people.

29th April 2020

Compliance with the customer limit in large stores and passengers in public transport has become more important than ever. The current epidemiological situation underlines the importance of safety and comfort for consumers and vehicle users. Reliable technology is essential to determine the number of people in a given space precisely. IoT can play an important role in the enforcement of current legislation and in the execution of the required way of transporting passengers.

Major security challenges

In Poland, several restrictions were introduced at the beginning of the year to minimize the growth of infections, including a limit of customers staying in the store. According to the current regulations, since May 4, 2020, there is a limit of people in retail facilities with a sales area of over 2000 m2 – there must be 15m2 of retail space per one customer. The Regulation of the Council of Ministers on establishing certain restrictions, orders, and prohibitions in connection with the occurrence of a state of the epidemic has also imposed restrictions on private and public collective transport – from March 31, only half as many people as there are available seats may be in a vehicle. In practice, the latter restriction, in particular, is proving challenging to implement.

Those responsible for enforcing government restrictions face new challenges:

The need to establish a maximum number of people who can use a given space at the same time and make every effort to ensure that it’s not exceeded,
Counting customers located in large stores,
Setting the number of passengers permitted to use the transport service simultaneously with compliance with the occupant limit.

A reliable crowd flow monitoring system should precisely record people’s inputs and outputs, providing real-time measurement results. With accurate data, it’s possible to determine the number of cashiers needed to serve customers, estimate the traffic in the store at specific hours, and measure the size of the passenger stream. Traditional measurement methods may not be sufficient. Let’s take a look at the possibilities offered by the Internet of Things solutions.

RapidLab People Counter – a small device with great possibilities

It’s a small device that records people’s inputs and outputs and then transmits this information via Bluetooth 5.0. The measuring device uses a modern Time-of-Flight sensor, which allows you to accurately measure the distance from the sensor at 256 points simultaneously. This way it’s possible to obtain a spatial image analyzed in real-time. It provides a precise recording of the crowd flow passing through the measuring point. In the case of long distances between the sensors, counting the incoming and outgoing people can be supported by additional a device called a gateway. The range of a single sensor is about 30 m in a vehicle or building and about 100 m in an open space.

Are you looking for reliable technology for counting people?

People-counting device use cases

Transport	Retail
Metro, trains, trams, buses, trolley buses	Small and large stores
Monitoring of people using public transport on specific routes	Traffic monitoring in both small retail and service points and stores belonging to the largest chains
Increasing the safety of drivers, motorists and passengers	Increasing employee and customer safety
Real-time counting of passengers entering and leaving the vehicle	Counting customers entering and leaving the store in real-time
Analysis and reporting to forecast the demand for new rolling stock investments	Analysis and reporting to forecast demand for the products concerned
The possibility of exempting drivers, motorists and other staff assigned to this task from counting passengers	Possibility of producing valuable statistics and summaries of consumer behaviour

Safer city with the Internet of Things

The data acquired through the network of sensors in the vehicles facilitate the identification of traffic flows and can be used to analyze the functioning and development of the transport system in a specific area. In a smart city, thousands of communicated devices will continuously transmit data that can be analyzed to improve how the city works. The result can be control over infrastructure, safer public transport, and shopping in comfortable conditions.

Sources:

https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/aktualne-zasady-i-ograniczenia
https://www.gov.pl/web/koronawirus/kolejne-kroki
https://www.gov.pl/web/5g/inteligentne-miasta-smart-cities