Real-time Operations and Device Control with People-Measurement

I would never have anticipated the range and variety of use-cases we’ve seen for people-measurement. Some of them come from industries and applications I hardly knew existed. Some are imaginative extensions of the technology into problem-spaces far outside the traditional customer experience domain. And some involve taking personalization concepts that we know are effective in other direct to consumer channels and bringing them into the physical space.

These use cases are important. Often, they have direct and immediate ROI. They can make experience better, use labor more efficiently, or solve hard problems in safety and security. As important as flow-analytics can be, operational monitoring and control probably drives more people-measurement investment and return than flow-analytics.

Here are just some of the ways people measurement is getting used in process and device control:

Personalization: Personalization works. It’s a reliable method to improve customer experience and marketing impact. From online re-targeting to catalog selection to music playlists to hero image choice, if you can personalize content to take advantage of the known interests or tastes of the user, you can make things work better. Personalization has been nearly impossible in the store. The only place it’s been at all successful is in register promotions and, in a few cases, loyalty program interactions. But with people measurement, you can use what people have engaged with or seen to drive video, discounting, display and more.

Automation: Anyplace you have a manual process based on things like occupancy, presence, or wait time, you can replace that process with ongoing monitoring and automated notification or direct hardware control. We’ve seen use cases for things like automated dispatch (for everything from triggering a departure when a bus/train/car/etc. is full) to triggering an intervention (send an officer when a curbside is backed up at an airport).

Dynamic Allocation: People are nearly always the most expensive asset you have, so using them optimally is critical. By monitoring conditions, you can dynamically allocate resources where they’ll have the biggest impact. This can be as simple as dynamic allocation of maintenance based on usage and as complex as allocating associates to the highest value (or most in need) shoppers in a store.

Fun: Experience matters. Adding fun touches to an experience based on movement, presence or activity can make a space come alive. We’ve seen use cases ranging from sound and lighting effects to fountains to interactive displays.

Accessibility: Everybody wants to make experiences accessible, but it’s not always obvious how to do that – especially when an experience might require dynamic adjustment. With people measurement, you can detect things like wheelchair usage, height and even velocity to adjust experiences for specific people.

Information: Sometimes, the best way to tune a process is to let people know what’s happening. We’ve built public displays based on people-measurement for everything from university cafeterias to public landfills to airport queues to train car occupancy. In all these cases, public views let users adjust their behavior based on current conditions – which creates a load-balancing effect that makes the system work better for everyone.

Conservation & Efficiency: How often do public spaces leave unnecessary lights on when a space is unoccupied or have AC adjusted to handle crowds that don’t exist? Pretty damn often. People-measurement can optimize the efficiency of lighting, HVAC and other systems based on real-time need. This can save money, support green initiatives, and improve experience all at the same time.

Safety: There are a surprising number of safety-based use-cases for real-time people measurement. Most are based on the simple concept that there are places where you don’t want people to be. People-measurement can be used to stop a drawbridge from going up if a person is on the wrong side of the gate. It can stop a train if there is an animal on the track ahead. It can make sure people aren't in the wrong places on a boat or up on the railing of a bridge. Automated monitoring of no go areas is nearly always better, cheaper and more reliable than putting constant eyes on an area.

Security: Lidar has become a significant tool in security and perimeter monitoring. And, of course, camera has long been one. But people-measurement brings an intelligence to security monitoring that can often improve the performance of systems. You can provide alerts based on detection scenarios, pick out unusual behaviors, and even steer cameras to what requires eyes-on from security personnel.

?

Not one of these use-cases require significant analytics. Yet, the systems driving these applications will provide analytics as well. That means that the ROI benefits work both ways. If you’re focused on analytics, it’s just smart to take a look at these use-cases and see if your measurement system can drive extra benefits. On the other hand, if you’re deploying people-measurement for perimeter monitoring, HVAC control or personalization, you should be taking analytics into account as well.

Finally, you should know that many of these applications are sensor agnostic. The right technology choice will usually be driven by the specifics of your location (indoor/outdoor, ceiling heights, size of area, lighting, day/night, etc.) and the economics of coverage. That means if you already have lidar or camera sensors deployed, you almost certainly have the capability to execute any of these use-cases in the covered area.

?