Helsinki launches real-time crowding heatmap

The City of Helsinki’s new Heatmap site shows how busy areas and venues are in real-time to help people plan trips while avoiding crowded areas.

The project aims to improve safety, support the tourism industry and deliver new data for the city.

A colour-coded map, which is updated every minute, has been developed with software company Hypercell, and the city is installing sensors in the centre and other popular tourist areas to detect anonymous Bluetooth signals from devices such as mobile phones.

The signals measure crowd volume, the average time people spend in specific locations, and the movement of crowds within the sensor network.

The trend for tracking busyness in cities via sensors or CCTV analytics has accelerated during the pandemic to support social distancing and recovery planning but not all systems offer citizen-facing tools and many are not real-time. Helsinki claims its Heatmap is a world first.

Data

Businesses that host sensors will be visible on the Heatmap and can use the collected data for “a variety of purposes, including optimising their marketing and measuring customer potential in different areas”.

Meanwhile, the city will use the sensor data to understand which tourism attractions are most popular and to focus services based on demand. The data could also be useful for traffic planning and other initiatives.

“The data provides excellent building blocks for future urban planning efforts.” the city said in a statement.

Marja-Leena Rinkineva, Director of Economic Development for the City of Helsinki, commented: “The health crisis has also taken an extremely heavy toll on the tourism sector. Helsinki has suffered from the impacts of the coronavirus crisis more than the rest of Finland, as a large part of the local ecosystem has been built upon hotels, restaurants, events, event services and experiences. What we need to do now is make strong efforts to develop new joint operating models to increase and communicate about safety.

“Heatmap is a great example of how businesses and the City of Helsinki can create an even safer city together. Safety and spaciousness are among Helsinki’s strengths, even on an international scale.”

Privacy

Last month, the Dutch city of Enschede was fined €600,000 (US$716,000) for its use of Wi-Fi sensors to measure the number of people in the city centre. The Dutch Data Protection Authority said the programme, which began in 2017, made it possible for the data to be linked with individuals and for movements to be tracked over time. The municipality is appealing the decision and said the accounts are anonymous and that no personal data has been processed.

A statement from the City of Helsinki said: “All the data is collected anonymously, and none of the data can be directly or indirectly linked to other data to enable the identification of the user in question.”

The Heatmap is being implemented as part of a data pilot under the ‘Regional management of safety in tourism’ project, which is funded through tourism recovery grants from the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment. It will run until the end of the year.