EvolvePlus Blog

How City of Port Phillip will monitor the usage of Community Parklet Pop-Ups

Background

The temporary community parklets are a new form of public space popping up in parking bays across the City of Port Phillip.

EvolvePlus provides an extensive range of IoT People Counter solutions for both indoor and outdoor environments including libraries, retail stores, shopping centres, galleries, public toilets, office buildings, park entrances, leisure centres, pedestrian paths and more.

With so many different people counting models to choose from, including Wireless, USB, Display Only, Overhead Thermal, Overhead 3D, Single Side Laser and LoRaWAN, it can be confusing to know which model is best suited for your footfall tracking.

To help you choose the most suitable people counter we have created a People Counter Features Comparison page which provides a quick side by side comparison of the various features.

Our battery-powered LoRaWAN People Counters offer a reliable, user-friendly, and affordable people counter solution that provides valuable insights and footfall traffic analytics to organisations. LoRaWAN is a Low Power, Wide Area (LPWA) networking protocol designed to wirelessly connect battery operated IoT sensors over long distances.

One of the key features of our LoRaWAN People Counters is the choice to push the traffic data to either the EvolvePlus Reporting & Analytics platform or to your own reporting platform.

The following provides an example of how organisations can push JSON data from the LoRaWAN People Counters using HTTP Integration within The Things Network community edition. 

We've recently enhanced our Occupancy application for the EvolvePlus Wireless Counters to provide an additional visual alert when displaying a live count of the number of people currently inside your building, which helps comply with COVID-19 social distancing regulations.

The Occupancy app has a new setting to provide a visual warning of when the occupancy is nearing the maximum occupancy threshold. The colours used in the display of the live count display are:

• Green: when the current number of people inside is below the maximum or warning threshold
• Orange: when the current occupancy is getting close to the maximum threshold
• Red (with additional message & sound alert): when the current occupancy has reached the maximum threshold

The live count total is displayed on a responsive designed web page compatible with TV screens, desktops, tablets and smartphones that can be mounted at the entrance or accessed remotely by staff. The live count total constantly updates higher or lower depending on the number of people entering or leaving the various entrances.

With Governments imposing social distancing regulations to flatten the curve of COVID-19 businesses are now required to control the number of visitors entering their venue, facility or shop. Many have responded by assigning physical personnel to control the customer traffic at their entrances/exits.

The Connected Occupancy Clicker is a web app that is designed for use by security guards, attendants, greeters, concierge to manually count customers entering or exiting multiple entry/exit points. The recorded count data is automatically synchronized across multiple devices and provides a live occupancy count which can be displayed on TV screens, desktops, tablets and smartphones.

When the occupancy limit is reached, a visual alert appears on both the Connected Occupancy Clicker and the associated screen display.

Versatile yet simple, the EvolvePlus Occupancy Display Counter is battery-powered and features a built-in LCD display. The discreet display enables easy data collection by displaying real-time count data showing separate directional counts and current number of people inside.

By means of advanced techniques and protocols, it is possible to detect the direction that a person walks through the horizontal beam emitted from the Transmitter. The two direction counts and total people inside calculation are clearly visible in real-time on the LCD display. 

Features include a 6-digit LCD display, integrated brackets for easy yet sturdy mounting, long battery life and reads through glass. The counters can be fitted on Anti-Shoplifting Gates without causing any interference or standard entrances up to 8 metres wide.

Our Occupancy People Counter solution featuring the People Inside Web Application enables organisations to view the number of people currently inside a venue. This feature is ideal for venues that are required to monitor capacity numbers in real time to comply with government regulations, liquor licensing laws, venue capacity limits, etc.

We currently have customers utilising this solution to assist with their compliance with the limits on organised gatherings due to the Coronavirus COVID-19 (internal gatherings of fewer than 100 people or outdoor gatherings of fewer than 500 people).

Our wireless people counters record the number of people entering and exiting a venue and automatically send the data every minute to the IMMOTION Cloud. We also offer Instant People Counters that relay data in real time without any lag to ensure you’re getting accurate to-the-second visitor numbers.

In addition to accuracy, privacy is an important issue for many organisations implementing a people counting solution to ensure they remain compliant with the relevant GDPR and Australian data privacy regulations. 

The EvolvePlus Horizontal Wireless and Overhead Thermal IoT people counters are the ideal solution to provide anonymous traffic monitoring for all types of environments including office buildings, retail stores, libraries, public toilets, footpaths and leisure centres. 

Our Horizontal Wireless and Overhead IoT people counting solutions utilise Infrared and Thermal technologies to accurately measure footfall traffic in real-time without using cameras or capturing personal data.

We've updated the video section of our EvolvePlus website with several new support videos for the EvolvePlus people counter solution.

The new videos include:

• Videos providing a step by step guide that shows how to change the batteries for the Wireless People Counters, USB People Counters and Display People Counters 
• A video that provides a step by step guide on how to download data from the USB People Counter to a USB Memory Stick and upload to the IMMOTION software application

Other videos on the site include installing the IMMOTION people counter software application for Windows Server, an overview of the web application for viewing people counter statistics per hour, day, week, month and year, as well as an overview of EvolvePlus IoT wireless, USB and overhead thermal people counters.

A key feature of our EvolvePlus IoT People Counters solution is our IMMOTION software platform where data from our IoT traffic counters and devices are available from a unified dashboard & reporting platform. 

The platform enables organisations to analyse their people counter data using dashboards, reports and charts accessed via web browsers on desktops, tablets or smartphones. Users can filter by specific locations, positions, sensor and date/time periods ( hour, day, week, month, and year).

We also recognise the need for organisations to incorporate their people counter data into their Business Intelligence apps - so we make it easy for organisations to connect to the data platform using a range of APIs for your authorised BI apps to read the footfall data and incorporate in a combined dashboard. For example: Hourly People Count vs Sales, Hourly People Count vs Staff Rostering, etc.

EvolvePlus is delighted to support the IPWEA International Public Works Conference being held from 25 to 29 August 2019 in Hobart, and is the largest public works Conference held in Australia

EvolvePlus offers an extensive range of people traffic counting solutions that deliver unparalleled accuracy and reliability. Our people counting systems solve a variety of traffic monitoring challenges for all types of public infrastructure including buildings, libraries, public toilets, footpaths and leisure centres, with models available for both indoor and outdoor use.

Whether you are trying to measure traffic to support project funding, optimise labour, determine usage, view occupancy or increase conversion ratios, the IMMOTION platform for Smart Cities offers a range of Internet of things (IoT) sensors to collect data and provides the ability to analyse the data to manage infrastructure and resources efficiently using data technologies such as NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, 3G/4G and Ethernet.

November 2019 is the inaugural exhibition of our Wireless People Counter solutions in New Zealand. EvolvePlus is delighted to support the ALGIM (Association of Local Government Information Management) at their annual conference being held from 4 to 6 November 2019 at TSB Arena Wellington.

EvolvePlus offers an extensive range of people traffic counting solutions that deliver unparalleled accuracy and reliability. Our people counting systems solve a variety of traffic monitoring challenges for all types of environments including council buildings, libraries, public toilets, footpaths and leisure centres, with models available for both indoor and outdoor use.

Whether you are trying to measure traffic to support project funding, optimise labour, determine usage, view occupancy or increase conversion ratios, the IMMOTION platform for Smart Cities offers a range of Internet of things (IoT) sensors to collect data and provides the ability to analyse the data to manage infrastructure and resources efficiently using data technologies such as NB-IoT, LoRaWAN, 3G/4G and Ethernet.

The latest IMMOTION software application for the EvolvePlus range of IoT People Counters is now available for on-premise and cloud delivery platforms.

The IMMOTION software application continues to bundle the EasyReports, CentralManagement and SensorServer applications from the previous SensorServer software, and now includes:

• New Graphical Dashboard for Traffic Counting data analysis and comparison
• New Moodbox dashboard providing insight on the Smiley Feedback Counter results
• New API using NODE.js

The IMMOTION application is available for the following footfall sensor technologies:

EvolvePlus has launched it's new range of battery powered Customer Feedback Counters to gather valuable customer satisfaction information. Our wireless Smiley Feedback and Mood Counters offer a reliable, user-friendly, and affordable solution that will help almost any type of organisation to gain valuable insight to improve customer satisfaction and customer loyalty.

The size and weight of our battery powered Smiley Survey Counters allows for installation almost anywhere, including Public Libraries, Airport Toilets, Galleries, Customer Service Centres, Retail Stores, and more. It is available with optional metal brackets for mounting on a stand or wall.

The IMMOTION Smiley Feedback Counters are designed and built in Europe for the highest quality, available with a choice of 5 separate smiley buttons and can be configured with a "feedback button press delay" to minimise repetitive button presses. 

Automatic email notifications are now available for our range of Wireless, Overhead Thermal and Single Side Laser People Counters.

The Mailer application for SensorServer enables you to configure your server to send automatic email notifications to display warning messages and issues with your Wireless People Counter solution.

It is a great way of ensuring that your People Counter solution is operating correctly without having to manually login to the CentralManagement web application each day.

We are excited to share our Product Roadmap for the next 12 months which includes new People Counter and IoT Smart Building solutions. Some of these solutions will be released shortly whilst others are in the development and pre-production phase.

We are investing in the latest data communication technologies for our products to support the delivery of innovative smart city projects. One of the new technologies that we will be implementing to connect some of our new people counter and smart building devices is Narrowband IoT (Internet of Things).  NB-IoT was developed to enable efficient communication and long battery life for implementing devices across wide geographical footprints and deep within urban infrastructure. It can be used to connect devices, such as sensors and deliver real-time information and analysis.

Some of the upcoming and planned products include:

Our modular People Counter solution makes it easy to integrate the footfall data with other information systems that your organisation may be using - ranging from Sales & Finance systems through to BACnet Building Automation and Control Systems.

Two popular methods for integrating the EvolvePlus People Counter solution with other systems include:

1. Using our DashboardPlus web application to connect to your information systems (EvolvePlus People Counters, Sales & Finance databases, Building Automation and Control Systems, etc.) and to provide meaningful insight of data from a central dashboard portal
2. Connecting to the EvolvePlus People Counter database and incorporating the data into your BI Reporting Tool or Building Automation Systems.

Whether you are using our Wireless People Counters, USB People Counters, Single Side Laser People Counters or Overhead Thermal People Counters, they all capture the counter data and save to an open source MySQL database, which makes it easy to connect to and automatically extract or link to the data for your own reporting analytics platform. We provide a detailed layout of the tables & column to assist with extracting your own data. In addition, a custom API can also be developed to suit your integration requirements.

EvolvePlus has released a number of People Counter videos on our new product video website at https://video.evolveplus.com.au/people-counters.

Our people counter product videos provide a visual representation of how the EvolvePlus People Counters can be used in different environments, as well as the showing how easy it is to deliver in-depth analysis on your traffic counting statistics.

The most recent videos published on the site are:

EvolvePlus is pleased to announce the release a new product model within our wireless people solution - the Single Side Laser People Counter.

Whether you are trying to measure traffic to support project funding, optimise labour, determine advertising effectiveness, or count items on a production line, EvolvePlus provides the tools that assist organisations increase profitability and optimise operational efficiency by analysing visitor traffic to make informed business decisions. 

Our new Single Side Laser People Counter enables you to count pedestrians and moving objects via a user-defined counting distance (0.2 to 8 metres) without requiring a separate receiver or reflector.

People counting solution for the outdoor exhibition at Australian National Maritime Museum.

Background
The first-ever outdoor exhibition held at the Australian National Maritime Museum where visitors can explore six colourful containers scattered around the museum like giant Lego pieces. Each container uses solar power to run internal lighting and displays.

The Challenge
To gauge the popularity of the exhibition, a unique and cost-effective people counting solution was required. The people counting solution had to operate on batteries and/or required a minimum power drain from the solar power supply of each container. The people counting solution had to be inconspicuous and automatically report visitors in real time.