Umm Muhammed Umar

WITS University innovators have developed a novel WiFi based solution for managing and monitoring foot count, social distancing, and consumer behaviour in shopping malls. The solution uses Artificial Intelligence to allow retail managers to make future predictions, improve security and deliver intelligence to stores (consumer patterns). Inventor of the novel technology, Dominique Adams, has been awarded R100 000 Rand worth of support from WITS Enterprise, to take the innovation to the next stage.

Adams told Radio Islam that his award came as a surprise. He said he was asked to join the prospector course, which was an intense six-week program. Adams said, “We had already been in development of other projects that Enterprise was aware of, and so in pitching this idea, we already had quite a substantial backing, and I think that put us at quite an advantage.” He added, “we are in a stage where we were ready to go to market…… but this definitely did come as a surprise.”

With the outbreak of the pandemic there were a lot of ideas as to how to curb the spread of the virus. Adams said that led to the idea of developing a tool to monitor social distancing with the use of artificial intelligence, by able to monitoring the number of connected devices in a certain area.  He said, “And this clustering of devices will be able to give them an idea of where there are large numbers of people gathering, and that way then, there could be an alert system where they would then go and enforce social distancing among the people.”

In the event that social distancing became redundant, the movements of shoppers could still be tracked, to see which areas of the shopping mall would be the busiest, and at which times, especially in respect of the security issues that malls are currently facing. Adams said, “with the social distancing and now with the tracking, we can then kind of gauge and see which areas are where there’s a lot happening.” He said that the tool could later be adapted for specific security purposes, for example, linked to security cameras and such. Adams added, “more managers can have better control and they can make sure that security reaches certain areas much faster than what they can now.”

The tool could be marketed in parts of the world too., just as long as there are WIFI points available to be accessed. Adams explained, “And then once a person enters the shopping mall with a device with the Wi Fi on, it immediately picks him up and starts to track where they move within a shopping mall. So, it will definitely be beneficial to other countries, (both) other African countries and the developed countries.” He said their goal was to as many shopping malls and centres as possible.