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The austerity measures have caused a colossal discontent among the Portuguese people
who found on strikes and protests the only way to show their outrage at the loss of wages and entitlements.
Lately, thousands of people have come to the streets but the way they are counted is always controversial
That's why the show "Falar Global" this week shows you how technology can help in the process of crowd counting.
Week after week the streets and squares all over the country are populated by
unhappy people, protesting against the current economic situation.
The more the people, the more socially stronger the protest becomes,
and it's important to determine the number of participants. The truth is that there is rarely consensus on the numbers.
Consider the conventional methods.
Usually, tools as Google are used to calculate the area where people are
concentrated and then it's determined that there can be between 2 to 6 persons per square meter
depending on the concentration of human mass.
After this, the extrapolation value is calculated according to the occupied area.
It's easy to occur discrepancies in the counting of protesters, therefore recurring to alternative techniques
supported by advanced technology can substantially reduce error margins.
Around Knowledge, founded by former researchers at the University of Porto
developed a technology, BIPS, that uses mobile phone signals to determine the number of people who are in a particular place.
Your cell phone emits different radio frequencies like Bluetooth, WiFi and GSM and those signals are intercepted anonymously by BIPS.
We don't know who the person is or it's phone number. We only know that there is a number of mobile phones in that area
within a defined radius, and our antennas pick up their signals.
Those signals are processed by our software to give information
such as the number of devices, visit frequency, returns, visit duration, patters or most visited locations.
In the protest organized by CGTP (Portuguese Workers Syndicate) against unemployment, Around Knowledge
made the first real-time technology assisted crowd counting in Portugal.
The company set up a perimeter within an operating range of 30 meters (aprox. 100 feet), and all devices in the system's radius were detected.
With this technique more than 8000 people were counted in “Praça da Figueira”.
In this case the results turned out to be quite close to the ones acquired via the traditional method of observation about 7500 people.
We have antennas that pick up the radio frequencies of the devices and when people are close
our software that is connected to hardware, captures the signal of the phone.
Each device has an unique identifier
that allows us to count the different devices of people passing here in "Praça da Figueira".
Yet it is difficult to determine whether all mobile phones detected belong to people who were participating in the demonstration.
BIPS significantly reduces the margin of error when compared to traditional methods.
Nowadays the current passive counters are unable to distinguish
if a person passed by a place 15 times or 15 different people passed by that place.
BIPS identifies each signal as unique
and this allows us to say that we have 15 people here, and that they are not the same.
Someone with two mobile phones can be a problem but we define a range
that allows us to know that 2 or 3 cellphones belong to the same person.