Taoglas has announced Crowd Insights, a people movement analytics platform to assist with the urgent public health need for managing crowd sizes and social distancing at the height of the coronavirus pandemic.

Nations, states, cities and health systems across the world are doing everything they can to manage the Covid-19 crisis. Regulations are being introduced across the globe to combat the spread of the virus including crowd controls to limit social interaction and gatherings.

To assist with the massively challenged health systems, Taoglas is already working with a hospital in Ireland to provide this free of charge. It will also be offering it to other health systems at cost.

“To do our part during this time of crisis for world humanity, Taoglas has taken proven technology from our recent acquisition of ThinkSmarter and accelerated development to launch a unique solution to help municipalities, governments, healthcare systems and enterprises monitor and manage crowds,” said Ronan Quinlan, co-CEO and founder of Ireland-based Taoglas. “We believe this will be vital in the days and months to come to allow people to move around safely without fear and to get the economy moving again. Municipalities and businesses are now required to monitor the density of groups of people in public, to optimise social distancing, to ensure that the virus does not re-establish. With a cost-effective tool to measure, monitor and manage people movement, we’re looking to help to expedite getting life and businesses back to normal.”

Crowd Insights monitors the numbers, flows and dwell times of people in public areas and sets thresholds to alarm if an intervention is necessary. It is fast and easy to deploy as it’s based on wifi systems already prevalent in most places today and collects anonymised data via smartphones. All that is required to deploy is a consultation with the firm’s technical support team and the network administrator.

An entire system can be deployed in the same day remotely via a cloud management platform to any health care facility, venue, retail store, restaurant, airport, city or town. It provides real-time insights and alerts on crowd and queuing situations with reports or via a city or enterprise dashboard.

No special software is required on the phones or on the wifi networks to get started and it works seamlessly with Meraki, Cisco, Ruckus, Aruba and other wifi equipment.

It has remote and no-touch deployments and a configurable platform with the ability to set up new monitoring zones as needed. And it aligns with EU privacy and GDPR requirements.

Given the situation, crowd management and control is the new reality across healthcare facilities, retail, entertainment, airports and public spaces. With regulations imposing a limit on the number of occupants, Crowd Insights can provide the intelligence in a usable way to help businesses and governments comply with density and capacity limits.

The platform is based on ThinkSmarter analytics technology, which Taoglas recently acquired. The platform has already been deployed successfully in the field with customers including Three, Hutchison, Vodafone, Fira Barcelona, Greenwich, DCU, Sligo, Dun Laoghaire and Dublin city.