CAM-593

Twenty-two minutes waiting for assistance to arrive

The special assistance meeting point, next to a busy concourse. It is a signed corner with a rug, armchairs and a rope marking it out, and a screen saying the team is about to arrive. Inside there is a person in a wheelchair with her dog beside her, on her own. The armchairs next to her are empty. Along the concourse six hundred and forty people an hour go past on their way to the gates. She has been there twenty-two minutes and for the last eighteen nobody from the service has come into the area.

CAM-593 · ASSISTANCE POINT · WAITING ALONE 22 min

What IRIS understands

What it recognises in this scene

assistance point sign
person waiting alone in the area
assistance dog lying beside her
empty armchairs beside her
waiting area marked out by the rope
concourse flow towards the gates
gate signs above the concourse
apron seen through the window

What this camera measures

An alert says something is happening. The reading says how much.

22 minTime waiting at the point
0Service staff in the area
18 minSince anybody from the service came by
640 / hPeople walking past in the concourse
15:48:30Video starts at

The figures on this screen are an example from the illustration, not any client's measurement.

The rule

You decide once. IRIS applies it always.

somebody has been at the assistance point for more than twenty minutes

And alsonobody from the service has come into the area

Then

alert the assistance coordinator with the point and the minutes waited
say whether anybody from the service is at any of the other points, so they can be redirected
log the wait in the day's assistance service record

The instruction that set it up«Tell me if somebody has been at the assistance point for more than twenty minutes with nobody from the service arriving.»

What changes

What changes for operations, for the passenger and for maintenance

There is nothing to watch here and everything to attend to. A person who has requested assistance and has been waiting alone for twenty-two minutes is someone who may miss a flight, and nobody knows because the team is dealing with another arrival at the other end of the terminal. An alert at twenty minutes bothers nobody and costs one message. On top of that, the record of the average wait at each meeting point is exactly what you need to size the service and to answer a complaint with a figure instead of an apology.

What people usually ask

Does IRIS know who that person is or what she needs?

No, and it will not know. IRIS sees that somebody is inside the waiting area, how long they have been there and that nobody from the service has come in. No faces, no names, no information about the person, and least of all about their health or circumstances. All this camera produces is a clock: somebody has been waiting twenty-two minutes in a place where you wait for somebody to come. That is enough for a person to turn up, which is the whole point.

Isn't it intrusive to put a camera where people wait for assistance?

It is a question worth asking, and the answer is in what it is used for. This is a public, signposted meeting point in the middle of a concourse hundreds of people an hour walk through, and the camera looks at nobody: it measures whether the area is occupied, for how long, and whether anybody from the service has come in. No faces, no identification, nothing about the person. And the use is the exact opposite of surveillance: it is to make sure the person who should come, comes. Where there is no IRIS camera is inside a toilet, a changing room or an examination room, and there never will be one.

And what if she has already been attended to and is just resting?

Then the alert is closed in five seconds, because whoever receives it opens the video and sees. An extra alert here costs nothing: it costs a glance. A missing alert costs somebody sitting there for forty minutes and losing a flight. When the two are not worth the same, the rule leans to the side that matters, and the number of minutes is adjusted by writing it into the sentence until it matches how the service actually works.

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