Stratumseind

Fifteen thousand people between the ages of fourteen to thirty visit Stratumseind, Eindhoven's most famous pub street, every weekend. This results in eight hundred security incidents on an annual basis, in a street that’s just 300 metres long. An ideal location to serve as a living lab for innovative safety measures. Nowhere else are so many test subjects present every week.

Police, pub owners, municipality and entrepreneurs work together to improve the atmosphere at Stratumseind, which benefits security and the economy. Innovative ideas are also being tested for the remaining security incidents - particularly aggression. Ultimately, the intention is that all lessons learned will be applied throughout the city centre of Eindhoven. The main objective is to improve living and housing conditions in the city.

Approach
The Stratumseind living lab is a development and test environment in which companies, knowledge institutes, governments, residents and entrepreneurs of Stratumseind work together. New products and services are developed jointly, focusing on technology, sociology, violence management and crowd management. This requires the collection and analysis of all kinds of data. To this end, cameras, sensors and measuring instruments have been installed in the nightlife area. All data can be tracked in real time in the information centre of the living lab.

Innovation
All innovations developed and tested at Stratumseind contribute to the improvement of the living environment of Eindhoven residents, with the help of new technology and digital means. Some examples:

• Community-building
  Visitors, entrepreneurs and residents are involved in their own safety in various ways. In addition to social media, experiments are carried out with apps and mobile games about Stratumseind that can be used as a means of communication.
• Atmosphere
  One of the first experiments at the start of the living lab is influencing large crowds with the aid of light. People's moods and behaviour change by adjusting colour and light intensity. Another experiment concerns drivers showing off, meaning a noisy driver drives through the street a number of times. Is it possible to recognise that car, to visualise it and to make it clear via image or sound that the driver is passing by for the umpteenth time and that it really has to stop now? Furthermore, the effect of smells on human behaviour is tested.
• Aggression detection
  Experiments with acoustic sensors make it possible to recognise the sound of fireworks or breaking glass and to determine their location very accurately. Recognising a voice with a high level of stress is being tested. It also visualises how the crowd moves and where abnormalities occur. If it shows an accumulation of dots (visualisation of people), something may be going on. Especially if one of those dots is recognised by the system as a woman. Furthermore, video analysis software is being developed for recognising a clenched fist flying through the air.
• Data collection
  All sorts of sensors at Stratumseind collect information and pass it on to the information centre. Data are also processed from other sources, such as the police, beer brewers, Dutch Railways, KNMI, Road Safety and Transport Agency and telecommunications providers. The system itself will have to warn city surveillance and the police in the future based on all these data. Privacy by design and data ownership are of paramount importance. ‘Data principles’ and IoT guidelines have been developed for this purpose.

Business
Stratumseind is public area. The municipality of Eindhoven considers the public space to be the property of the people of Eindhoven themselves. It therefore takes the view that all the raw data collected should be made public. The data is thus returned to the citizens based on the idea of data-ownership. The good thing about this is that companies are free to use this raw data to develop new products and services that improve the quality of life in the city. Processed data, however, will remain the property of the corresponding company.

Participation
The living lab Stratumseind is an initiative of the municipality of Eindhoven and the Dutch Institute for Safety & Security (DITSS). Companies that want to develop and test their products and services in practice can contact DITSS. This is free of charge. The costs for field trials are for the account of the party requesting them. A prerequisite for participation is that the innovations are in line with the objective of the living lab, and that raw data is made available on the ‘open data portal’ of the municipality of Eindhoven. Participants include Tilburg University, Eindhoven University of Technology, Intel, Axis, ATOS, Sorama and ViNotion.

Contact Details
Dutch Institute for Safety & Security
Tinus Kanters, project leader living lab Stratumseind
tinus.kanters@ditss.nl