Main field deployments in which the team has been actively involved, demonstrating the project’s technologies in real-world settings.

The Galveias Palace is a landmark cultural space in Lisbon. Originally the country residence of the Távora family, it later became their permanent home after the 1755 earthquake. In 1928, the building was acquired by the Municipality of Lisbon and converted into a Municipal Archive, Library, and Museum. It currently houses the Galveias Palace Municipal Library, which plays an important role in the city’s cultural and educational life.

The palace includes several indoor rooms of cultural significance, primarily used for quiet study and group work, complemented by a garden and a kiosk area that offer open and accessible spaces for leisure and community use. Both indoor and outdoor areas are also occasionally used to host cultural events, talks, exhibitions, and small public gatherings, resulting in varying patterns of occupancy throughout the day.

The deployment of the crowd monitoring system in this context aims to provide continuous and real-time insight into the occupancy of study rooms inside the palace, as well as the outdoor garden and kiosk area, under both regular daily use and event-driven conditions. This information can support library management and municipal services in understanding how different spaces are used over time, identifying peak periods, and adapting operational decisions accordingly. Potential benefits include improved allocation of staff and services, better planning of events, enhanced user comfort in study areas, and increased situational awareness during periods of higher attendance. By combining discreet sensors with an intuitive dashboard for data visualisation, this deployment demonstrates how privacy-preserving crowd monitoring can support the sustainable and data-informed management of multifunctional cultural spaces.

The Pena Palace is a well-known Romanticist castle in São Pedro de Penaferrim, in the municipality of Sintra, Portugal. It is one of the most popular tourist sites in the country. Pena Palace is surrounded by Pena Park, a large walkable park with several gardens and landscaped areas with indigenous and exotic species from all over the world. The park also includes waterfalls, tanks, lakes, and fountains, along with small decorative buildings that visitors can explore.

As the majority of people come to Pena Park just to visit the Pena Palace, the latter is faced with permanent overcrowding, leading to long queues and unpleasant waiting times that deteriorate visitors' quality of experience and satisfaction. On the other hand, Pena Park is much less visited and ends up being a relatively unused space, with such a wide and large area to explore that most visitors usually do not take advantage of. 

Faced with this problem, tourism managers have been trying to increase Pena Park’s attractiveness and encourage tourists to visit areas other than just the Pena Palace to mitigate the over-tourism problem and enhance visitors' quality of experience as they are introduced to the numerous attractions that Pena Park has to offer. One of those incentive actions involved holding horse riding events to encourage people to visit Pena Park instead of going directly to the Pena Palace.

The Palace of Monserrate is located in the parish of São Pedro de Penaferrim, in the municipality of Sintra, Portugal. Francis Cook, a wealthy 19th-century English industrialist and great art collector, materialized this popular tourist destination. Cook transformed Monserrate into a very attractive tourist site, with lush gardens of exotic species worldwide and a palace like a true work of romantic architecture.

The Monserrate Park is also the stage for the "Jazz in Monserrate" music festival. Privileged for its contact between culture and nature, this festival combines a place of contemplation and wonder par excellence with a solid, high-quality program. It is also a meeting point for generations, conviviality, equality, and fusion.

Given the attractiveness of this festival, crowding sensors are installed in Monserrate Park to monitor the festival area and measure its impact, which information will be provided to the tourism managers.

Located in the heart of Portugal's most important wetland, the Tagus Estuary Natural Reserve, EVOA — Tagus Estuary Birdwatching and Conservation Area, allows visitors to learn about and enjoy the unique heritage of Lezíria and the Tagus Estuary.

EVOA integrates three freshwater wetlands, covering a total of 70 hectares, with lagoons that are of extreme importance for birdlife as they are used as refuge and nesting areas. It also allows visitors to experience this unique and distinctive fauna, being the attraction for many birdlife enthusiasts and bird watchers. It is also the destination for many study visits by young classes of students.

To ensure the tranquillity of the birds and maximize the visitor's experience and comfort, the EVOA has built several observatories, photographic hides, and inconspicuous viewpoints throughout its vast area. Nevertheless, excessive noise generated by visitors (possibly generated by the excess of people in the small observatories and photographic hides) could disturb the birds and cause them to fly out of the lagoons, negatively influencing both its tranquillity and the visitors' experience.

Therefore, the crowding sensors are being deployed across the several observatories and photographic hides to help preserve bird life while promoting birdwatching. The sensors will monitor the occupancy of the small booths, allowing the EVOA’s managers to better manage the visitations according to their occupancy, avoiding potential disturbances by an excessive number of people. Furthermore, high-sensitive parabolic and acoustic sensors will be copulated in the sensors and used to determine the bird species by listening to their distinctive sounds.

A total of 6 sensors are being deployed across the EVOA, from which a first technical reconnaissance was already conducted, and the final installations will be prosecuted soon.

A network of sensors was deployed at several spots across the Iscte’s Campus, and crowding information was collected for long periods. The sensors were deployed in typical usage scenarios within the university, in both indoor and outdoor environments, to test the sensors in different areas with different crowding behaviors, such as areas with an extended permanency time (study room and university library) or areas with a heavy traffic flow of people (indoor and outdoor passages).