What’s the idea?

There is an opportunity for technology to be available ‘off the shelf’ to sense WiFi-enabled devices, as a tool to understand how people use parks and green spaces, including routes taken or the length of visits.

Parks managers could use insights to make the case for investment, enable data-driven maintenance schedules or measure the impact of a change to the park. There are understandable ethical and legal concerns when tracking devices carried by park users, and the focus of this project is to understand the technical, practical, legal and social limits of this approach.

Who is working on the project?

The project is being delivered by the University of Nottingham in partnership with Nottingham City Council. Researchers at the University are providing the technology, legal and evaluation expertise. Staff at the Council’s parks service are helping to understand how data could be used, providing expertise about the management of parks and practical support with technology deployment.

Background

We need data on how people use parks to enable more cost-effective staffing and maintenance, and for strategic planning. However, it is almost impossible to gather accurate, ongoing data about visitor numbers (e.g. variation over hours, days or seasons) and behavioural patterns (e.g. duration and which areas they visit) using traditional methods.

WiseParks will develop and test a combination of low-cost WiFi sensing hardware and analysis software, starting with a trial of a single sensor and working up to a full sensing network. As well as testing technical feasibility, the team will engage parks managers, partners and user groups to demonstrate the value of the approach.

At the end of the project, the team will have produced publicly available guidance for future deployment that is cost-effective and open while protecting personal privacy.

What’s happened so far?

The project started in October 2018. As of August 2019, we have deployed sensing technology at multiple locations across two parks. Some sensors are temporary battery-powered devices while others are longer term installations with mains power. Our sensors have so far detected more than 12 million signals from 600,000 unique WiFi devices and one sensor has been continuously operating for six months. To reach this point we have surveyed and understood the current and likely future legal restrictions on tracking people using WiFi probe requests. We have built and tested suitable hardware and software and we have been through an ethical approval process at the University.

We have been undertaking two further studies in parallel, a manual count of parks users to ‘calibrate’ the technology, and online and face-to-face engagement with parks users to gauge their reaction to being counted using signals from their devices and to evaluate our signage and public information.

Taking a prototyping approach has led us to design our data gathering approach to include a gradual increase in the number of deployed sensors. We have adopted a disciplined approach to managing the large amount of data collected even from a single sensor, using what we have collected so far to continuously challenge our assumptions about how it might be used in parks management decisions.

How will other parks learn from your work?

At the end of this project we will deliver practical guidance to parks thinking of using this technology as it becomes more mainstream. To enable parks managers to replicate our work, we will make our hardware and software design open source and make recommendations about data handling and analysis.

WiseParks is one of five projects we are working with to test and develop ideas that could support parks to attract resources and develop more sustainable operating models. Nearly £500,000 in National Lottery funding and other support has been allocated to the five projects as part of Rethinking Parks, a partnership between Big Lottery Fund, Heritage Lottery Fund and Nesta.