The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   One of the biggest challenges to doing people-measurement is the cost and hassle of the cabling. Deploying standalone single sensors has always been possible. But when data needs to be fused across multiple sensors to track customer journey, each LiDAR sensor must be connected via a home-run (a … Continue reading "Look Ma, No Wires!"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   One of our clients at Digital Mortar is a chain of gas/convenience stores measuring the full journey from pump to shop and back. What makes their use-case more compelling is that the stores are a significant upscale from your traditional gas convenience mart – with lots of more … Continue reading "Measuring Journeys from Outdoors to Indoors"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel Although Digital Mortar isn’t really focused on loss prevention or security applications, there are two big reasons why it matters if you’re thinking about people-measurement. First, there are times when you can dual-purpose sensors to do both crowd-analytics and security (which greatly improves your hardware ROI). Second, when it … Continue reading "People Measurement Alerting for Security and Perimeter Monitoring"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Customer Journey alerting can completely transform the experience of a physical space. Instead of waiting for a customer to seek out help, it actively looks for opportunities to use the available help most effectively. Common use cases include identifying customers who absolutely require assistance (unmanned support, locked cases, … Continue reading "Customer Journey Alerting with People-Measurement"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   While performance may be the biggest challenge in building a people-measurement based alerting system, the most important problem for most businesses to solve is HOW to use people-measurement alerting. Use-cases tend to fall into one of these basic categories: operational management, customer journey, and security / loss-prevention. Of … Continue reading "The Operational Use-Cases for People-Measurement Alerting"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   The visible part of an alerting system – the text alerts, webhooks and emails users get – is the easy part. The hard parts are building the realtime pipeline for store or location measurement, creating things like the predictive queue model, and keeping the underlying alerting engine performant … Continue reading "The Challenge of a Real-time People-Measurement Alerting System"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Productionizing a predictive queue measurement model really involves solving two problems. The first is integrating the predictive queue model into a real-time pipeline so that you can generate predictions about future line states based on current data. The second problem is deciding what to do about those predictions … Continue reading "Productionizing a Predictive Queue Management Model"

The Measurement Minute with Gary Angel   Building a predictive queue management model is the penultimate and most interesting step in the process of building a queue management system. We used two different analytic techniques to tackle the problem: classic time-series and neural networks. The advantage of time series is that it is simple, easy … Continue reading "Building a Model for Predictive Queue Analytics"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   Probably the most important step in building a model is making sure you’ve got the right target variable. Usually that’s not too hard. But looking at our line data, we quickly realized that predicting line depth wasn’t going to work as straightforwardly as we thought. The problem is … Continue reading "Getting the Right Target Variable for Line Prediction"

The Measurement Minute by Gary Angel   After the data wrangling comes the fun part of any analysis – building the actual model. That starts with model selection. For predictive queue management, we’re looking at time-series models. And because we have store traffic and occupancy data, it will be a multivariate model. In addition, it’s … Continue reading "Choosing a Model for Predictive Queue Management"