Smart offices with Smart Vision
Recent COVID-19 pandemic events increased the necessity of security controls in the workplaces. Events like the number of people inside the offices, their body temperature and the respect of social distancing constitute problems of unprecedented importance.
Nowadays these controls or even the respect of the social distancing are done directly by specific employees, who are asked to physically go in those specific areas or to monitor the video recorder through the security cameras in real-time or even after a specific event already happened. The majority of the workplaces have multiple areas to control. This might be difficult or even impossible due to the limited number of employees. All these operations take them away from doing their day to day work and make life in the office more mechanical requiring costs in terms of time and energy.
Moreover, with smart working increasingly present in everyone’s working life the offices become emptier and emptier by the day and, because of that, the rent paid by the firms can be reallocated in other activities and functions moving the offices in new and smaller buildings.
The main question that you have to ask yourself is: How can I check all these factors with the lowest costs of time and energy?
That is where new technologies come into play. With the help of the Internet of Things and Computer Vision, we can create smart cameras which can identify anomalies in the surrounding environment. In order to do that Cluster Reply proposes Smart Vision which implements various solutions and models that are able to improve security, detect anomalies, use the office space more efficiently and improve the well-being of employees.
Smart Vision is a platform based on Microsoft technologies (like IoT Edge, IoT Hub, Custom Vision, Azure Machine Learning, Azure Storage Account, etc…). As already stated Smart Vision implements different features, each of these performs a specific task.
The main tasks that it implements are:
- People counter
- Facial recognition
- People presence control
- Body Temperature recognition
- Social Distancing control
Starting from the people counter we are able to count the number of people present in a certain area. It is very useful in a pandemic situation like the one we are currently facing because it allows avoiding gatherings inside certain rooms. It can also help the business to know if it can be useful to save money by renting a smaller building. Consider a case where from a data analysis it turns out that more than 50% of the rooms in the building are used by no one, it is safe to assume that it could be cost-efficient to move the office to a smaller building.
Facial recognition is a useful feature when it is necessary to optimize the management of the people who are entering the building or a restricted area. It can be able to identify both employees and clients that need to enter the office on a certain day. Think of a case where a client has a scheduled meeting with an employee of the company, it is possible to register him in the system and specify that on a defined date the client has to meet on a certain floor and at a certain hour that specific employee. By doing that he will be allowed to enter the building only at a time around the meeting. Before arriving at the office the client has to send some pictures of his face to the company so that his user can be registered and then he can be recognized. In addition to that, if a person wants to enter a restricted area it has to be identified by a camera placed near the door. If he is identified the door will open otherwise it will not. By doing this companies can control when and who enters the building, improving overall security and traceability.
In some cases, companies have to be sure that there is no one in a specific room (for example in case of fire). With the people presence feature, we are able to combine sensors and events triggering with computer vision algorithms to make sure that in those rooms there are no people present.
In our pandemic scenario, the body temperature feature is useful to understand if a person is sick or not. It increases the level of security of the office making employees feel safer going to work.
Finally, the social distancing feature is used to monitor the respective distance between people and the quantity of time spent too close to each other. It will launch notifications to the security team if the distance is not respected for a long period of time.
All data can be crossed with manual checks.
Those are the five main features implemented in our Smart Vision, other features may be implemented, if needed, depending on the core business of the company. In the case of a manufacturing company, for example, it is possible to implement solutions that are able to control the temperature of an area which needs to stay in a certain interval of degrees.
Our main goal with the Smart Vision platform is to help companies to build a safer and more secure environment, where social rules are respected, with the help of the new technologies available.
