Outside Station and Platform Monitoring

While stories of crowd crushing and scenarios quickly becoming out of control are uncommon in the UK, it is for reasons unnecessary to explain, that near real time indication of people movement is a real asset.  Mitigating against potential crowd build up, and maintaining safe crowd control is so straightforward to do now by monitoring entrances and exits both outside and on the platform itself, there is little reason not to build this into a rail environment.  

A solution is Infrared Activity Sensors wall or pole mounted, where one Gateway can connect 1000 of the Activity Monitoring Nodes even through a wall.

The example below shows typical outdoor monitoring outside of a station, with the main entrances being monitored.  Each sensor reads and transmits data to a Gateway which relays the data without the need to ‘connect to’ onsite LAN or WiFi to the Urban.io Cloud.

Infrared Activity Detection

Each Gateway can transmit over a 500 m distance, through 10-15 walls.  With legacy structures like railway stations and the  underground network, walls are very much a feature that need to be accommodated. 

The set up

Sensors are placed on a wall or a pole, typically 3.5m in height, to guarantee a 5m object or human positioning depending on the sensor placement.

A sensor positioned vertically down has an infrared aperture of 120 degrees, with a maximum detection range extent to 5m.

A side wall sensor has an infrared aperture of 120 degrees with a maximum detection range of 5m.  This would be used to ‘see around a corner’.

 A pole mounted sensor has an infrared aperture of 120 degrees with a maximum detection range extent to 5m. Pole mounts are useful for detecting activity where there isn’t a wall to use or to extend a monitoring area.