What is real-time counting?
Real-time counting is the ability to display and act upon events as each person enters or exits your location. This can be used to monitor the occupancy (number of people in your building) or today’s visitor count.
Real-time counting is offered in addition to traditional counting. Your Xenometric system will continue to collect aggregated data from the counters and provide all the historical reporting that you’re used to, but it will also add a layer of real-time reporting and alerting based on the extra data that the counters can send.
Why count in real-time?
The real-time occupancy is useful in may ways, for example, to ensure that your building does not exceed your defined limit or to monitor when more checkouts need to be opened. For social-distancing, it can be important to monitor the number of people in your building. The real-time visitor count can be used to schedule regular cleaning or to understand how busy traffic is today. There are many applications for stores, shopping malls, offices, transport hubs and leisure venues.
How we count in real time.
Xenometric supports the collection of real-time counts from Optex, Flir Brickstream, Irisys and Xovis counters.
| Counter | Standard Data | Real-time Data |
|---|---|---|
|
Optex Akribos |
FTP and HTTP |
MQTT |
|
Brickstream |
HTTP |
HTTP |
|
Irisys |
HTTP and REST |
MQTT |
|
Xovis |
HTTP |
HTTP |
You might be curious why we collect data in real-time as well as collecting the aggregated (standard) data. We are collecting the same people counts twice, albeit in two different ways. The reason for this is due to all of the counters we support having the intelligence and capacity to store standard counts for many days. In the event of a network or server fault, the counters will continue to count and store count data in their memory. Once the fault is fixed, the counters will deliver all the missing data to the Xenometric system. The real-time data works differently. A real-time message is sent as a person walks under the counter, but it is not stored on the counter. If the server cannot receive the message, that event is lost. If we relied only on real-time data, we could lose counts whenever there are network or server issues. By collecting the aggregate counts and the real-time counts we can ensure that we always have an exact history of what the counter counted and we can offer a real-time option on top of our aggregate reports.
