Adaptive system for
crowding monitoring using user's devices fingerprinting
Adaptive system for
crowding monitoring using user's devices fingerprinting
Embedded Files
crowding monitoring using user's devices fingerprinting
crowd monitoring solution
crowd monitoring solution
Overview of the crowd monitoring approach, technologies, and practical rationale for its use.
Rationale
Rationale
Large crowds forming during temporary and often unpredictable events such as festivals, public celebrations, demonstrations, or touristic peaks pose increasing challenges for cities and public authorities. These situations can affect public safety, strain local services, disrupt mobility, and reduce the quality of experience for both residents and visitors. While understanding how crowds form and evolve is essential for informed decision-making, existing monitoring solutions are often intrusive, expensive, difficult to deploy, or unsuitable for short-term use. This project is driven by the need for a practical, privacy-respecting, and easily deployable crowd monitoring solution that can be used when and where it is needed, without requiring complex infrastructure or specialised technical teams.
In a nutshell
In a nutshell
The system relies on small, portable sensors that anonymously estimate crowd levels by detecting wireless signals already emitted by people’s mobile devices, without collecting personal data or tracking individuals. Sensors can be quickly installed in different locations and automatically adapt to the available connectivity, even in challenging environments. To ensure reliable measurements, an assisted calibration process can be used during deployment, helping sensors adjust to the specific characteristics of each site. The collected information is then presented in dashboards that provide real-time and historical views of crowding levels, supporting timely and informed decisions. The result is a plug-and-play crowd monitoring tool designed for real-world use by public authorities during temporary events.
Available Technologies
Available Technologies
Public administrations are often confronted with an overwhelming range of technologies when considering digital monitoring solutions. Combining sensors, connectivity, data processing, and visualisation requires expertise across multiple domains, making it difficult to decide which technologies to use and how to configure them reliably. This complexity frequently becomes a barrier to adoption, even when the operational need, such as crowd monitoring during events, is clear.
Simplified Deployment
Simplified Deployment
This project addresses technological complexity by delivering a reusable crowd monitoring toolkit tailored to public authorities. Validated configurations, clear operational guidelines, and supporting materials such as manuals, tutorials, and cost estimation tools enable the deploy and reuse of the solution independently. The project lowers adoption barriers and supports informed decision-making whenever crowd monitoring is required.
Proven solution
Proven solution
In 2024, the Iscte team in charge of the for crowd monitoring development participated in the CONFRONT – Challenge ON wifi FRame fingerprinting for people cOunting aNd Tracking, an activity funded by MOST (Centro Nazionale per la Mobilità Sostenibile), Ministero dell'Università e della Ricerca, Italy.
This challenge consisted of three tasks, of increasing difficulty. Seven participants from four countries (Germany, Italy, Portugal, and Slovenia) applied their fingerprinting algorithm to a provided dataset. In our case, this is the algorithm running on our edge nodes.
With a score of 295.92 out of 300.00, the submission of the Iscte team was the winner!
Demo
Demo
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