As COVID-19 social distancing restrictions have eased, people are going into stores, restaurants and restrooms while still trying to stay at least six feet apart. But what if you can’t tell how crowded the space is until you get inside? And what about people who are older or have underlying health conditions that put them at greater risk?
A tech expert, consultant and entrepreneur from Sammamish, Wash., has an award-winning solution. Using Bluetooth signals and credit-card sized Raspberry Pi computers, Ian Mercer created an inexpensive monitoring and notification system that he’s calling Crowd Alert.
“It was something I could do to help everybody at risk,” Mercer said.
He recently pitched his idea at the COVID-themed Better Health Hackathon, a remote event hosted by HCL, an India-based global technology company, in partnership with Microsoft.
Crowd Alert took the top prize this week, winning $20,000. The team includes Mercer’s London-based brother Simon, who owns a graphic design business, and his daughter Becca, a university student.
“It’s very exciting. We thought we were on to something,” Mercer said. “It was nice to have this distinguished set of judges in healthcare and tech and cell phones, for them to validate it and say it was the best idea.”
It took only a few months for Mercer to pull together the concept. For years he’s been working on Internet of Things (IoT) signaling technology, experimenting and implementing them in his suburban home, which he suggests could be the smartest smart home in the world. With more than 200 sensors, the house automatically controls lights, heating, sprinklers, audio and other features. Mercer has incorporated natural language processing into some of the systems to enable the understanding of specific, nuanced verbal commands as well.
For the Better Health project, Mercer wanted Bluetooth-detecting sensors to count the number of people in a set radius. But many cell phones send out new, randomized MAC addresses every few minutes, which would suggest many more people were inside a space, and some people carry multiple Bluetooth signaling devices such as fitness trackers and headphones. Mercer ultimately created an algorithm that sifted out duplicate signals to give an accurate read on the crowd.
The hardware for the basic set up costs $54, and Mercer suggested different options for signs to let people know if a space is safe to enter. His basic concept is a sign using LED lights with illustrations of people separated by narrow or wide distances and lit up in red, blue or green. A business with an existing digital sign could add information about capacity. The system is designed to be easy to set up and require little customizing.
The Crowd Alert concept could also include an app so that people could remotely check how busy a restaurant, bar or shop is.
“It solves a real problem and I can see how you can quickly scale this out,” said hackathon judge Itumeleng Makgati, a chief information security officer with Sasol, an energy and chemical company.
The technology has uses beyond the COVID pandemic. It could be installed outside of restrooms at airports or large venues, in a corporate setting to indicate which conference rooms are free, or at a university to alert users which libraries are least occupied. Mercer has been contacted by a university to conduct a trial to detect and share the number of people inside a lab space.
Mercer is looking for partners who could handle the manufacturing, distribution and sales of the systems and would love to get them out in the public as quickly as possible.
“People don’t feel safe going into a store,” he said, “not knowing if it was crowded or not.”
