A well-known university in Singapore, with more than 33,000 undergraduate and postgraduate students across disciplines from engineering and business to humanities and medicine, needed to manage campus safety as new COVID-19 regulations took effect. Its solution partner, RetailDDS, set out to find a reliable way to monitor real-time occupancy for the university client.
The Challenge
To meet government rules and keep students and staff safe, RetailDDS needed to monitor real-time occupancy across high-traffic campus spaces — lecture rooms and teaching spaces, the library, building entrances and exits, dining halls and common areas, and the fitness center — and make that information visible to the campus community.
The Solution
RetailDDS leveraged the RetailNext Occupancy API to display live occupancy metrics from locations across campus on the university's website and mobile app in real time. The Aurora® all-in-one IoT sensor stitches video from multiple sensors to measure foot traffic across wide, open areas without custom programming, and rooms change color as they approach or exceed defined occupancy thresholds, with live counts of students, staff, and visitors shown to users.
The Results
The well-documented, easy-to-integrate RetailNext API let RetailDDS implement the occupancy solution quickly. The university could then accurately monitor occupancy, publish live findings to its community, optimize staff schedules, and support a successful social-distancing strategy — helping people see at a glance which spaces were safe to enter and which to avoid.
