Connect&Go, a Montreal spinoff company of RFID Academia, has commercialized an ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) attendance and traffic flow solution for conferences, following the deployment of its system at this year’s C2MTL conference. Unlike Connect&Go’s other solutions for concerts—which consist of NFC high-frequency (HF) RFID tags embedded in wristbands and RFID readers installed at various tap points throughout the venue—the UHF solution is designed to be completely undisruptive. An attendee puts a lanyard around his or her neck and proceeds through an access gate. All data collected regarding that individual’s location is then managed based on reads from UHF readers built into gates and chandeliers within the conference hall.
C2MTL (short for “Commerce + Creativity in Montreal”) is intended to be as much a festival as a business conference. The solution was designed to meet the needs of conference organizers for technology that would help them better understand attendees’ movements—for planning purposes—as well as enable guests to enter the site without requiring them to present their credentials.
This year’s event—which was held at Arsenal (a former industrial building converted into an art and events complex) on May 27-29—hosted 7,000 attendees, most of whom were senior executives of large companies. These individuals, who paid about $4,000 apiece to attend, heard from such speakers as Mohammad Yunus, a Nobel Peace Prize laureate and chairman of the think tank Yunus Centre, and movie director James Cameron. They also participated in a number of activities, including immersing themselves in a dry pool filled with plastic balls, in which they donned blindfolds and discussed solutions to business problems with other attendees and speakers.
C2MTL’s organizers sought a technology solution that would help them identify attendees’ locations and monitor how they spent their time during specific programs, as well as provide a means of allowing guests to simply walk onto the show floor without having to present credentials. C2MTL employed Martin Enault as its VP of partnerships and technology to help bring such technology to the 2014 event. Enault, the founder of events RFID technology firm Intellitix, who has considerable background in RFID technology, wanted a solution that would be more hands-free than traditional RFID-based events solutions, which typically consist of a high-frequency (HF) tag that must be tapped against a reader.
Enault says C2MTL considered multiple options for UHF technology and found that RFID Academia provided a system that would offer the level of read precision required for tracking large volumes of people carrying UHF RFID badges as they walked through lanes into the show room. The challenge, Enault explains, was to ensure that every tag would be read as it entered or exited a gate, and that each would be differentiated from other tags in the area that may be passing through another gate or simply milling close to the readers.
Connect&Go offers a solution for access control at festivals, concerts and conferences, traditionally consisting of HF wristbands that wearers can use to obtain access to a venue, as well as at booths, to do such things as post photos of themselves on social-media sites for friends and family to see. In the case of C2MTL, the system needed to instead allow users to simply walk through the conference’s entranceways, but also be able to issue an alert if, for example, an individual had purchased admission for another day of the event but not the one during which he or she was entering. In addition, the system needed to be able to identify the quantity of visitors in each zone, in order to help determine traffic patterns and understand attendee behavior.
The challenge for Connect&Go, says Anthony Palermo, RFID Academia’s founder and business development director, was to enable the conference to capture attendees’ movements at any orientation as they walked through the doors. There were two sets of four gates through which tags needed to be interrogated, and C2MTL wanted to know through which gate each individual passed. Attendees were issued a badge with a built-in UHF Smartrac Frog 3D tag, as well as a Smartrac Circus NFC passive HF tag made with NXP Semiconductors‘ NTAG213 chip. The reason for the Smartrac tag was to enable personnel to use NFC-enabled phones (rather than more expensive handheld RFID readers) to read an individual tag on an attendee’s badge, when necessary.
At each side of an admission gate, a Connect&Go tower was installed, with a reader antenna on one side and an RF-blocking panel on the other to prevent tags from being interrogated by the other readers. As attendees passed through, the unique ID number on each individual’s badge was read and transmitted via a cable connection to the Connect&Go software, which identified that individual and his or her status as paid or not for that particular day. Security personnel at the event watched a light (visible only to the staff) that was illuminated green with each read if a badge was accepted, or red if it was not. For each red light, a worker could then proceed to that individual to determine the reason. “We don’t want to treat anyone like a criminal,” Palermo says, so the system enabled staff “to discreetly take someone aside.” Security employees could then use an NFC-enabled phone to manually read the badge’s NFC tag for verification.
The second set of four gates was also installed at the entrance to the main forum, where presenters were scheduled to speak.
In the conference itself, RFID readers in the form of chandeliers were hung 20 to 30 feet overhead in three zones, in order to track attendees’ movements. Each chandelier created a read zone on the show floor measuring 30 feet by 30 feet in area. The system then collected data regarding which tags were in which zone, as well as when and for how long.
The data collected has enabled C2MTL’s organizers to identify behaviors they had not previously observed, Enault reports. For instance, they learned that people ate and drank more at some locations than at others. This information will help them better assign food, beverages and employees at future events to reduce wait times. They also discovered that attendees tended to arrive later than expected, and that a greater number of individuals spent time outside of the speaking area participating in other activities than had been previously thought. With that information, C2MTL intends to adjust its 2015 event to include more activities outside the speaking area. The solution also enables C2MTL to gauge which speakers were not drawing many attendees, and determine when more tickets could be sold because seating did not reach maximum capacity.
RFID Academia has been approached by approximately a half dozen other conferences that would like to employ UHF technology in a similar manner during the coming conference season.
In the meantime, C2MTL plans to expand the Connect&Go installation for its 2015 conference to include additional reader locations, and to deploy Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) beacons and provide a related app for attendees to install on their smartphones. With the beacons and app, the conference can share information with each guest, including the types of individuals within his or her proximity (such as executives in an industry of interest to that attendee). The app could also accomplish this via the UHF tags worn by attendees, Enault says, in cases in which beacons’ signals are not being picked up well by guests’ smartphones. He says he would like to see BLE become more reliable on Android and BlackBerry phones. RFID Academia can provide the beacons for the BLE feature as well, Palermo says.