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Ensuring Safety With Building Occupancy Calculators and People Counting Technology

Written by Beonic Team | Aug 7, 2024 12:21:37 PM

How Lumen EMEA Leveraged Beonic’s People Counting Technology To Ensure Building Safety and Efficiency

Lumen is a multinational technology company that powers the 4th Industrial Revolution (4IR) by helping companies capitalise on emerging innovations.

By integrating telecommunication network assets, cloud connectivity, security solutions, and voice and collaboration tools into one unified platform, Lumen enables businesses to fully collate and leverage their data and adopt next-generation data-driven technologies.

The Challenge

As part of their health and safety policy, Lumen EMEA needs to understand how many people are present inside their European properties at any given time in case of an accident or emergency. They required a building occupancy reporting system for their large offices and warehouses. 

Reporting building occupancy for a larger space with multiple entrances and exits has two primary challenges: 

  1. Accuracy of counts at each entrance/exit, and 
  2. Handling the small percentage of “missed” people who entered or exited the building without being counted.

Lumen needed people counting technology that could be installed across multiple sites (both offices and data centres) of varying sizes and was accessible via the cloud.

The Solution

To cover the first issue of accuracy, Beonic deployed overhead infrared sensors that are rated at 99% accuracy.

The second issue of handling the 1% of potentially missed people is handled by a resetting interval. This zeros out the occupancy account on a regular basis when the building is empty.

This people counting technology has proven to be successful in large facilities like factories and small rooms like public restrooms. The algorithms to maintain true occupancy reporting have been refined over time in these real-world scenarios, and today the system is reliable as soon as installation and calibration have been completed.

A web-based dashboard was provided for Lumen, containing real-time and historical occupancy data, which can be viewed as an overall building metric or per entrance/exit.

 

Testimonial

“Following Lumen Technology’s move to flexible working we realised we had an issue – we did not know how many of our fire wardens would be on-site on any particular day.

To resolve this we asked Beonic to install their presence monitoring system in a number of our facilities across Europe. This not only allows us to know how many people are on-site, but in an emergency we can quickly and easily confirm that the building is vacant. We utilise Beonic to support our emergency evacuation process and to assist the fire brigade in managing incidents. It means that the fire brigade do not have to unnecessarily risk their personnel searching a burning building as we can easily and safely confirm that it is empty.

Each project was surveyed, installed and supported to give us confidence in the system and the company.”

-Gavin Gibson, Senior Manager Environment, Health, Safety & Quality, EMEA

The Results

Beonic has installed the large building occupancy and reporting system across three of Lumen’s European offices to date with more to come in the future.

The dashboards enable Lumen to understand how many people are in their buildings at any given time. Should the worst event occur, these reports will enable Lumen to respond effectively.

To learn more about Beonic’s people counting technology and building occupancy calculator, visit our Solutions page or request a demo today.