People Counting...made easy

Wouldn't it be great if you could keep track of the numbers of people attending any location you wanted?

The answer is..."of course it would", but this is a much more complex and difficult task than would first appear. You've probably seen the poor souls who sit on a busy road, at the shopping mall, or at community events, using thumb-counters and clip-boards to log the numbers of people shopping, driving, or attending a festival. That is a very old-school way of collecting statistics in the digital age. Not only is it expensive but often fraught with errors and generally only possible for short periods of time, say, up to 8 hours of information. It's still being done this way in many places, but some clever technologists have started to replace these antiquated methods with new, and often very expensive, high tech solutions. Now Meshed has developed a cheaper way to do it.

We'd been thinking about people-counting at Meshed for some time because many of our Local Government clients had asked if it was possible to use people counting technology on a LoRaWAN, and at that time it wasn't available. Councils have millions of dollars tied up in infrastructure and facilities for communal use, but often no idea of how often they are frequented, or how many people enjoy them...or even when they are used. Fortunately Liverpool City Council (LCC) in south west Sydney had also been contemplating this problem. We decided to throw our hats into the ring with LCC and University of Wollongong (UoW) to see if we could attract some Federal funding under the Smart Cities and Suburbs Programme in June 2017 that was looking for innovative new ways to improve cities through data driven decision making. To our surprise, in such a competitive landscape ,we were successful and the LCC Smart Pedestrians project was born.

The aim of the project is to collect pedestrian numbers and vehicle movements in the CBD of Liverpool as well as additional urban livability data such as air quality. This data can then by used to establish base-lines, and to inform planning and infrastructure decisions as Liverpool transforms rapidly over then next few years. The people counting part required that we find ways to establish foot traffic in the Liverpool precinct, including a public park, and two technologies were identified to achieve this.

UoW SMART Infrastructure facility have developed a CCTV image processing technology that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to analyse images in real time, and send the people-count and vehicle-count information over the LoRaWAN. It is then transported to a database and visualisation platform over the free-to-use telecommunications provided by The Things Network. This is great technology and possibly a world first, that can count people, cars, buses and almost anything the software can be taught to recognise. But what do you do for areas that don't have CCTV, or it's not practical to put CCTV there?

Enter Meshed and the nCounter.

We have developed a small device that can live in a park, on a corner, inside a building, at a festival, or on the beach, that can count people's mobile smart devices as they walk past. It can also tell how long each person (or their phone at least) stayed in the area, without identifying them in any way (important to stay in step with privacy legislation). Let's face it, almost everybody carries a smartphone these days except for the very young, and some of the very old. Once again the nCounter device uses the LoRaWAN free network coverage provided by The Things Network to transfer data over the internet and to the UoW database/visualisation platform, for further analysis.

Meshed have deployed four LoRaWAN gateways, installed by LCC that are now providing connectivity to the Smart Pedestrians project to connect the UoW CCTV units and the Meshed nCounter devices. Even better, the same gateways are providing free public LoRaWAN access on The Things Network for anyone within range of the gateways, up to 10km away. A great boon for innovation in the Liverpool area available to every citizen, business and entrepreneur at no cost. Many councils across Australia have now deployed region-wide LoRaWAN networks for their own use, and their communities to use for free, and are using Meshed to support them.

The good news is that anyone can create their own LoRaWAN coverage by buying a low-cost gateway (base-station). Just like Wi-Fi, LoRaWAN can be deployed just about anywhere there's a power point, or solar panel available and The Things Network takes care of the data transfer at no cost. Meshed is now making nCounter available so get in touch if you think people counting is something your organisation needs. We would like to thank LCC and UoW SMART Infrastructure facility, and the Federal Government, for the fantastic collaboration, hard work and strategic foresight in getting the Smart Pedestrian project off the ground.

Email to [email protected]