How long has someone been waiting who cannot go and find help?

Twenty-two minutes in, and unable to get up

Ten past one in the afternoon. At the special assistance point, beside a busy walkway, someone is sitting in one of the armchairs with their luggage next to them. The screen says the team is on its way. They have been there twenty-two minutes. Nobody from the service has appeared yet, and they cannot get up to ask: that is precisely why they are waiting in that spot and not somewhere else.

1 cameras across 1 sectors

This is how you ask for it

«Tell me if someone has been at the assistance point for more than twenty minutes and nobody from the service has come.»

If the team arrives late, that person misses the flight, and missing a flight when you depend on a wheelchair is not solved by the next connection: everything has to be rebuilt, with assistance, with luggage and with hours to fill. On top of that, it is one of the few airport services whose waiting times are collected and compared. And in the worst case there is a formal complaint, answered with data rather than with the impression of whoever was on shift.

You decide once

You decide it once, and you decide it with the assistance service: how many minutes are too many at each point, in which windows — the six a.m. departure wave is nothing like the mid-afternoon one — and who receives the alert. IRIS applies it every day at every point at once, including the ones far from the control room that nobody ever looks at. When the service commitment changes, you change the number, not the habit.

An assistance point is a strange place: it sits in the middle of a crowded airport and is at the same time one of the easiest places to become invisible. Whoever is waiting there cannot go and find anyone. They cannot walk to a desk, or go up a floor to ask, or join a queue. They are where they were told to wait, and their only tool is waiting.

And the service is not late out of carelessness. It is late because three flights land back to back at that hour, two teams are busy in the other terminal and one new colleague does not know the corridors yet. The system knows an assistance request exists. What nobody knows is that in that armchair twenty-two minutes have already gone by.

IRIS watches the assistance point and measures one very simple thing: how long someone has been there without anyone from the service approaching. When it passes the limit, it says so, with the camera and the minutes. It does not know who that person is, and it does not need to: the alert is about a place and a duration, not about somebody. And along the way it leaves the record of how long the wait really is at each point and at what hours — exactly what you need on the day you sit down to talk about service commitments.

And there is a variant that accounts for half the calls: the empty point. The team arrives, there is nobody there, and nobody knows whether that person left on their own, is at another point, or never came down at all. With the camera it is resolved in a minute: you look at whether somebody was there and at what time, and the team stops walking two terminals looking for someone who has gone. It is not the flashiest thing on this page, but it is what stops the service losing quarter-hours in the wrong place.

What changes

Before, the delay came to light in the complaint, or when somebody missed a flight. Now, at minute twenty, someone in the control room sees the point and the elapsed time and radios the nearest team. Most of the time the team is already on the escalator and the call lasts ten seconds. The times it is not, you gain the quarter of an hour that separates making the flight from missing it.

Where we have seen it

CAM-593Twenty-two minutes waiting for assistance to arrive
«Tell me if somebody has been at the assistance point for more than twenty minutes with nobody from the service arriving.»
See this camera →Airports

What it does not do

IRIS does not identify the person waiting, does not recognise faces and knows nothing about their booking or their flight. It sees that someone is at the point and how long they have been there.

And it does not know either whether that person is waiting for assistance or has simply sat down to rest. That is why the alert accuses nobody of anything: it is a reason for someone to look at the point and ask.

And it does not know whether the assistance team arrived or somebody else did: it only knows that someone approached that area. A colleague passing by to ask counts the same as the assistance itself. That is why the alert is a reason to look, and why the record is read knowing exactly what it measures.

Questions

How does it know the person sitting there is waiting for assistance?: It does not know for certain, and that is why the alert reads as what it is: somebody has been at the point for a long time and nobody from the service has approached. It may be a person waiting for their assistance or someone who sat down to rest. In both cases it is worth having a look and asking, and in one of the two you stop a flight being missed. An alert that required certainty would always be late, and here being late is precisely the problem.
Can it be used to measure the company providing the assistance?: Yes, on one condition: that the figure is measured the same way every day and at every point. What IRIS leaves behind is the time between someone arriving at the point and someone from the service approaching, always measured with the same area and the same criteria. It supports a serious conversation about waiting times, the report you have to file, and knowing which windows need reinforcing. What it cannot do is judge an individual member of the team: IRIS identifies nobody.
The point sits beside a busy walkway. Does that not confuse it?: No, because the area is drawn over the assistance point only, not over the walkway. What counts is that someone is inside that marked corner and stays there, not that people walk past. Anyone crossing the walkway enters and leaves in seconds and never meets the duration. It is the same reason the threshold is measured in minutes and not in instants: in an airport the unusual thing is not that there are people, it is that someone has not moved for a long while.
Does it work in other places where someone is waiting for help?: Yes, and it is usually the second place it gets installed. The same idea works for a meeting point for unaccompanied minors, for the room where a patient waits on a trolley before a scan, or for the pick-up area of a day centre. The area changes, the minutes change and the recipient changes. What does not change is what is measured: how long someone has been waiting in a place another person was supposed to come to.

See all the questions

See it for yourself

No extra alarms here. Just what needs looking at.

Not a recorded video, not an explanatory drawing: a summary of the real screen, with a different case every time it starts. There is a lot more behind it.

You draw the line
It counts by itself
A number comes out

IRIS NEURAL

30ES

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These words are the ones we have built, not the ones IRIS understands. The list falls short on purpose: you ask for it in a sentence, and sentences do not run out. Tell us what is in front of your cameras and we will tell you whether it understands it, or not yet.

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And the best part

By the eighth hour of a shiftnobody watches the way they did in the first. That is not a flaw.

It is being human. A camera has no eighth hour: at four in the morning it understands what it understood at noon, and it speaks up just the same.

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