by Kyce Poya – Market Leader – Hospitality, N3N
The concern for public safety has seemingly reached an all-time high with the continual rise of mass shootings and terrorist attacks. Schools, casinos, amphitheaters, sports arenas, and any large gathering have been and continue to be primary targets for both foreign and domestic assaults.
Tragic shooting incidents have occurred in our society at venues with thousands of people in attendance. When these instances arise, how do venue staff and police determine where the shots are coming from? Often times during these events, multiple people call into 911 sighting a variety of shooter locations making it difficult to pinpoint the exact location. These horrific incidents also raise the question, how can firearms be prevented from entering the premises to begin with? Metal detectors aren’t always a practical solution for all venue types and entry ways.
What solutions are available to help detect and respond to safety issues?
I have spent the last year focused on researching safety threats at large scale hospitality and entertainment venues and identifying technology solutions available to improve the security and well being of attendees. The growing need for physical safety solutions has sparked a surge of sensor and analytic development by manufacturers worldwide. To give you an idea, here are just a few examples of physical security sensor and analytic tools:
- Gunpowder Detection: Accurately detects any explosive material within a 9 ft +/- radius through barriers. These mobile or stationary sensors can be deployed in areas where metal detectors aren’t practical.
- Shot Location Detection: Acoustic sensors that detect gunfire and triangulate location within feet.
- Sentiment Analytics: Video analytic algorithms that identify postures and body movements as potentially hostile
- Audio Analytics: Use of camera audio or acoustic sensors to detect aggravated voices, glass break, and more.
What challenges do security teams face?
Adopting physical security IoT technology can deter and reduce the impact of violent attacks from occurring on-premise but with it comes specific challenges that venue decision-makers struggle to address. The development of a multitude of innovative disparate devices, systems, and solutions brings the problem of integration and management. Surveillance teams already face a daunting task with their existing systems, monitoring countless CCTV feeds, web-hosted applications, social media software, internal systems, metal detectors, attendance tracking devices and more. Operators experience sensory overload making threat identification evermore challenging. Adding any additional systems exacerbate the challenges if they aren’t addressed adequately. The good news is, there is a solution that venues can leverage as they implement essential safety and security tools without compromising interoperability.
Is there a way to efficiently manage all these systems and devices without compromising interoperability?
Safety and security breaches require detection in real-time and many are often lost due to fragmented systems and data. For security teams to operate effectively and efficiently, they need to have all their systems and data converged into one holistic view. N3N provides a vendor agnostic visualization platform that addresses this ever-growing need. Leveraging N3N’s platform to merge CCTV feeds, applications, and systems into one single pane of glass will help event venues achieve a truly seamless and fully-integrated view across all security systems, applications, and devices to gain real-time intelligence and situational awareness needed to empower surveillance teams to make smarter, faster action and more importantly, saves lives.
About the Author:
Kyce Poya’s background includes close to 10 years of technical experience most recently coming from a seven-year career at Cisco Meraki. Much of his time and efforts at Meraki was focused on providing seamless, easily managed networking equipment for the hospitality industry. Kyce also worked with large venue management organizers during his time at Eventbrite. He offers a unique understanding of technology within the hospitality and event space.
About N3N:
Organizations and smart cities across the globe trust N3N to deliver innovative digital transformation and IoT solutions to achieve powerful business and operational outcomes. Our dynamic operations visualization platform seamlessly converges data from sensors, connected devices, video feeds and more in a single view for real-time actionable insights that drive real-world decisions. Founded in 2012, N3N is a Cisco venture-backed company headquartered in Foster City, California with global offices in South Korea, Japan, and Vietnam.
