Analytics in Action: Saving Lives at the Subway

Regardless of your job or industry, leveraging complex technologies, such as video analytics, can be a daunting task that takes time, effort, and practice as well as dedicated consultancy and support to effect comprehensive organizational impact. That said, many BriefCam users are surprised to discover how quickly video analytics can drive meaningful impact for critical needs – even before they have complete mastery of the system. During the implementation training for a US-based, major metropolitan public transit organization, an analytics alerting rule empowered an onboarding end user to save a life!

During training in the control center, police officers and other operations managers were discussing different scenarios where they could benefit from additional situational awareness. One of the most pressing concerns faced by this and many public transit systems is the significant number of homeless people attempting suicide by lying down on the tracks as trains approach. While there is excellent camera coverage on the platforms, typically only one or two people are responsible for monitoring hundreds of cameras throughout the terminal, making it impossible to catch every instance of unauthorized track access.

To enhance situational awareness on the tracks, the BriefCam customer needed to configure a line or virtual barrier in the system and set a real-time, rule-based alert that would trigger when people moving in a specific direction crossed the configured line. The dedicated BriefCam trainer helped the end user define the specific notification parameters to rule out movement from animals or maintenance workers that occasionally enter to service the tracks, thus mitigating false alerts.

A short time later – while the training session was still under way – the system triggered an alert that someone had crossed into the restricted area. The team immediately investigated and watched in real-time as a man went to lie down on the tracks. Police officers instantly mobilized, put train operators on alert, and dispatched officers to the scene to help the man off the train track and back to safety. Additionally, law enforcement was able to bring an efficient close to both the case and the internal investigation by leveraging critical data from the BriefCam solution and patented VIDEO SYNOPSIS® technology to understand the man’s behavior, route, and subsequent entrance onto the tracks.

While this public transit system user primarily adopted BriefCam to drive real-time and post-event review capabilities, looking forward, video analytics could further support proactive measures for reducing track-related deaths. By aggregating and analyzing historical data of similar situations and attempts, management could better understand where and how people are accessing the tracks, asses relevant patterns, and support decision makers in making critical infrastructure plans to proactively address the larger concern of subway safety.

BriefCam provides users with robust video intelligence technology, and it is exciting to see how –as early as implementation – the solution drives impact and saves lives.

Learn more about how video analytics can support major transportation and transit systems.