PRE2020 1 Group2

Introduction

The measures taken for prevention of the spread of the coronavirus financially affect all sorts of enterprises. Employees are obligated to work from home, children suddenly had to follow online education, thousands of people lost their jobs et cetera. From one moment to the other, there was a lockdown and it wasn’t allowed to leave your home if it wasn’t for a crucial job, grocery shopping or a for a run (on your own). Social distancing is the new norm.

The Netherlands is slowing building up the ‘1.5m-society’; hotels, restaurants, cafes, gyms, museums, education facilities, offices et cetera are allowed to welcome people again, provided that its visitors keep 1.5m distance at all times. However, there is one sector that is still deeply suffering from the measures taken concerning the coronavirus: the event branch. It is not (and will not be in the near future) allowed to organize events with large numbers of people. Festivals, expositions, fairs, markets, mass sports events are all removed from the calendars. But might there be innovative solutions that would nevertheless make such events possible again? That’s exactly what we are going to focus on during this project!

We are going to develop a device that makes sure all visitors of events always keep safe distance of 1.5m between each other. The principle is rather simple: everybody wears this gadget and when two (or more) come into a radius of 1.5m of each other, an alarming signal will go off. This will serve as a warning to the visitors to remain distanced from each other. Furthermore, the violation of the social distancing rules of this specific individual will be registered. The event-organizers could decide to intervene after for instance five warnings.

Objectives

The current COVID-19 situation makes the coming together of hundreds or even thousands of people impossible. The event branch is financially hit and does not have any certainty about when events will be allowed again. Therefore, goal of this project is to come up with an innovative and safe way to make the organization of events possible in times in which the coronavirus is lurking. It is aimed to develop and test a prototype and evaluate the functioning of the device and improve its functionalities.

Stakeholders

Users The direct users of the device will be visitors of events like concerts, festivals, expositions et cetera. When you visit an event at which this device will be used, you must accept the terms. This means that the event-organizers will provide you with a device that tracks the distance you keep from other people. This way the organization can do crowd control to make sure that everybody respects the rules of social distancing. The organization thus uses the devices to create a safe environment for its visitors.

Society Although restaurants and cafés are opening their doors and summer-evenings are being spent on the terrace, the festival-summer is entirely cancelled. The social isolation is deeply affecting not only children and young adults, but also the elderly. Everybody longs for entertainment, like we were used to. Therefore, it would be a relief, not only economically, but also psychologically for the society if the event sector could resume activities.

Enterprise In this crisis it becomes clear that many sectors profit from the organization of events. Sport athletes, artists, bands, orchestras, catering and all organizations that are responsible for the setting up of events suddenly were busy cancelling their events and paying back people’s money instead of making money. Many enterprises are in deep crisis or already went bankrupt. This device could make events allowed again, because it makes sure that the social distancing rules are being respected. Additionally, if extra attention is being payed to hygiene, events could take place again.

State-of-the-art

Al-Mahturi, Ayad & Rahim, Ruzairi. (2016). ULTRASONIC SENSOR FOR DISTANCE MEASUREMENT.

To find out the distance between different objects the technique of an ultrasonic sensor can be used. This technique uses sound which cannot be heard by humans. This theory is based on measuring the pulse reflection time. Ultrasonic sensors can usually measure a distance of 2.5 meters. One downfall of this technique is that the updates are slow as is measured in this experiment. However, with the distance measuring wearable for festivals this does not seem a problem.

http://essay.utwente.nl/75816/1/vanHummel_BA_EEMCS.pdf

Mu, W. Y., Zhang, G. P., Huang, Y. M., Yang, X. G., Liu, H. Y., & Yan, W. (2016). Omni-directional scanning localization method of a mobile robot based on ultrasonic sensors. Sensors, 16(12), 2189.

Literature study

Position Measurement using Bluetooth, by Sheng Zhou and John K. Pollard Using bluetooth there is an position error of about 1.2m indoors. Outdoors this is generally less, however in the case of strong multipath interference there can still be errors.

Distance Sensing with Ultrasonic Sensor and Arduino, by N. Anju Latha , B. Rama Murthy, K. Bharat Kumar An Arduino microcontroller in combination with an ultrasonic sensor can be used to measure distance. Ultrasonic sensor are popular, since they are cheap and have a precision of less than 1 cm in distance measurements of up to 6m. The most common method for measurement is the time of flight measurement, which measures the time between departure and arrival of a signal. A disadvantage of this way of measurement is that the target to be measured should be perpendicular to the plane in which the signal travels. It also the case that the bigger the target, the more accurate the distance will be measured.

The Impact of Covid 19 on Event Management Industry in India, By Mr. Anup M Gajjar & Dr. Bhaveshkumar J Parmar The event management sector is the fastest growing industry in India. This industry has a lot of damage because of Covid-19, but it is not easily quantifiable how much, since the industry does not come under one ministry or one department, in contrast to e.g. Germany. A lower growth of India’s economy will mean a lower growth of the event industry and a lot of jobs are at stake. The event management sector are now advised to organise events such that information is up-to-date, spaces are well designed to prevent crowd stupidities, communication is clear and event managers are urged to plan for finance and make hand-washing more accessible. It is not possible the identify the loss accurately, but it is certain that because of travel fear and public gathering fear it will take time to recover.

Other useful links: Arduino with an ultrasonic sensor and a buzzer. If an object gets too close to the sensor, the buzzer goes off. https://www.instructables.com/id/ARDUINO-DISTANCE-BUZZER/ Using Bluetooth: https://create.arduino.cc/projecthub/tanishq/diy-bluetooth-proximity-sensor-c82265 LIDAR: https://learn.sparkfun.com/tutorials/lidar-lite-v3-hookup-guide/all 15-25 cm accuracy(?) https://www.getmapping.com/support/height-lidar-data/how-accurate-height-data-and-lidar