Crowded places calculator

The  COVID-19 pandemic spreads faster in crowded areas: supermarkets,  pharmacies, restaurants, etc.

We propose creating an application for smart devices(smart phones, tablets, etc) which reports to the user the number of people(their devices) which are located in a specific place.Based on the reported numbers the user of smart device can know the population density for that area and decide to go or not to it.  In such way it is obtained a balanced distribution of the population between different place of interests(e.g supermarkets) and also keeping the infection risk under specific limit. Some risk factors(e.g. number of reported infections for the entire city, etc. ) reported by the authorities can be used by the application in order to raise alerts to the users.

For COVID-19 pandemic and future other pandemics the proposed application will decrease the spread rate of the diseases by allowing to have a better social distancing.

The  COVID-19 pandemic spreads faster in crowded areas like supermarkets,  pharmacies, restaurants, etc.

During these days  many governments authorities imposed multiple movement restrictions. However, people still need to buy their essential life aliments and/or drugs. We observed that, for example, some supermarkets and/or pharmacies are more crowded and others are less crowded due to the fact that people doesn't know the crowd level for a specific place before to go to that place.

We propose to create an application which shall be easily accessible by many people( e.g for smart phones). The application shall provide the geo-location(e.g. GPS) of each smart device to a central point (location server) which  centralize the locations from  all the reporting devices.

When needed,  the application running on the smart device can request from the central point the information about the number of people from a specific defined area(e.g a supermarket, a public place, etc ). 

In such way each person can find out which are the less crowded places.

During pandemics, all people are exposed to infections. By using the proposed application each of us can decrease the infection risk by avoiding the crowded areas. 

We consider that the proposed application can slow the infection rate.In such way the Covid-19 curve can be flattened by allowing the authorities to respond better to critical situations.

There are many mobile applications which are focused on traffic management.e.g. Waze, Google maps, etc

The difference between our solution and the others solutions is that our solution is tuned for pedestrian people and wants to calculate the population density in a specific area. Our proposed application is focused on counting persons inside well defined areas and not counting cars on a road. It will be tuned for doing that.

Such an application can be used also by the government's authorities ( to conveniently distribute their forces ) and by a simple man that wants to go to buy his needs from the supermarket.

We expect that this type of application to be used by many people in a short amount of time because it target people health protection and not only time spend in traffic with a car.

The proposed technology is already used for other applications like car traffic management. In our case we intend to use it for people.

Mainly the smart phone application provide its location(e.g. GPS, cell phone, wifi location info) to a central server/repository which analyze and provide accurate information when requested by the same or other device. Each smart device behave both like a   consumer and a provider of data for the central repository.

Private information of the smart phone user is not delivered to the central repository/server

The smart device application can communicate with the central server/repository by using existing web protocols and services. 

The central repository can include in the analysis also pandemic information provided by the authorities in order to raise alerts for specific areas.

The main requirements for the smart device(smart phone) are:

-provide its geo-location to the central repository using a good accuracy. e.g. 5m of GPS shall be enough.

-query the central repository for analyzing a specific region/area from point of view of population density.

-integrate the obtained information from the server with an existing map on the smart device.

For the central repository it is needed to have high computation power in order to aggregate all the requests from the reporting smart devices. As many smart devices report their presence in a specific area as accurate the system will be.

I consider that this technology is somehow used by car traffic management applications/systems.

The difference is that my proposal address other scope related to population density and it shall be tuned for pedestrian people situated on a specific area,mostly not a road.

As many people begin to use the proposed application the accuracy of the system will increase and it will give confidence to other people to use it. Also the reason for using it is more serious than in the case of traffic management applications. In our case people will want to use the application in order to protect their lives and not only to decrease the time spend on the road.