IoT solutions for large open-air events

This chapter presents the main results of the MONICA project, one of the five large-scale pilot projects funded by the European Commission. MONICA focuses on the adoption of wearable IoT solutions for the management of safety and security in large open-air events as well as on the reduction of noise level for neighbours. The project addresses several challenges in eleven pilots of six major European cities using a large number of IoT wearables and sensors. The chapter first introduces all MONICA challenges in the context of large open-air events and then presents the corresponding adopted technical solutions, the defined IoT architecture and the perspective in integrating a wide range of heterogeneous sensors. On one side, the focus is on the solutions that have been adopted to improve the crowd management, crowd safety and emergency responses by using wearables for both visitors and the security staff at the events, including also the adoption of video processing and data fusion algorithms to estimate the number of visitors and its distribution in the event area and to detect suspicious activity patterns. On the other hand, it describes how innovative Sound Level Meters (SLMs) can be deployed to monitor the sound propagation within the event area while reducing the noise impact on the neighbourhood.