Step onto the main concourse at King’s Cross station in London this summer and your every move will be tracked and analysed by a new AI system designed to anonymously monitor people, as well as spot people running or who may need urgent assistance.

The idea is to enhance security, safety, and the passenger experience by alerting staff to potentially dangerous events and behaviours in real time, so that immediate action can be taken.

But importantly, the technology does not recognise people’s faces, or monitor known individuals. Instead, everyone who enters the station is assigned a small dot that follows their movements anonymously; allowing security teams to trigger surveillance by security cameras if a situation of concern is identified.

“People are expected to follow certain paths within a station, such as towards a platform, shop, or exit; and there may also be areas that the public should not go, like platform ends. We can set up alerts if someone strays into those areas,” explains Rosie Richardson, the Product and Strategy Director of Createc, which has developed the tool known as Situate, which blends AI with LIDAR sensing, and has worked along Connected Places Catapult to refine her offer.

“We have also tailored the system for different spaces in a station based on what we expect people to do. If a person is waiting in a queue, that’s fine. But if they are loitering in a high throughput area like a corridor, it may need investigating.”

What if someone stops to frantically check their pockets for a lost ticket? “We wouldn’t identify a situation like that; people can get very stressed in stations,” Rosie adds. “There has to be quite a high threshold for an alert, otherwise the system would be constantly making them.”

Passengers running through a concourse will also be spotted by the system, so they can be asked to slow down for the safety of themselves and others. Overcrowding events are noticed early too, to give staff a swift alert to the incident and the best opportunity to respond.

In time, the technology will also be introduced on station platforms to alert rail managers if a passenger is standing too close to an approaching train, or trigger an audible warning over the public address system for people to step back.

“In real-time we can understand what is going on, and help security teams who cannot be expected to see everything on their screens all at once,” she adds.

Bristol Temple Meads trial

In 2023, Rosie and colleagues at Createc were invited to trial Situate at Bristol Temple Meads, as part of the Station Innovation Zone competition delivered by Connected Places Catapult on behalf of Network Rail. Their focus was on spotting passengers running along one of the platforms or straying over a yellow safety line before a train arrived.

“We were able to send an alert directly to passengers asking them to please stop running, or step back from the platform edge; negating the need to get a member of staff there.” Rosie adds that a system communicating directly with passengers may also be useful at quieter stations where there are less staff to intervene.

“We have thousands of stations that are unmanned and only monitored by old and grainy CCTV, so it is often hard to differentiate between someone wandering along the edge of a platform while drunk, or walking safely behind the line.

“The magic of our system is how we interpret data and make intelligent calculations to understand exactly where people are located, and what they are doing.”

Rosie says being selected to trial the technology in Bristol was a great boost for the company. “It gave us the opportunity to understand the needs of Network Rail and shape a solution without them having to commit to a project with us. Being part of the trial also allowed us to work on a station platform, which we would never have been able to do without the help of Connected Places Catapult.”

Rosie adds that Situate’s first funding was from the Ministry of Defence, which sought ideas to identify abnormal behaviour in crowds following the Manchester Arena attack in 2017. The crowd detection system has also been installed at Luton Airport.

In May this year, Createc received a King’s Award for Enterprise – its fourth Royal recognition since 2018 – for international trade, for its delivery of technology solutions around the world.  

An early appreciation of problem solving

Rosie Richardson’s route to becoming a technology innovator was far from conventional: her background is not technology focused, but she is “a problem-solver and someone who takes a human-centred approach” to her work. She grew up in north London before moving with her family to the Buckinghamshire countryside, where she learnt to ride horses. Rosie studied zoology and biology at the University of Leeds and became “fascinated by natural life, people and animals”.

“I have always been inquisitive and asked ‘why?’; probably much to the annoyance of my teachers and parents. I would always want to understand the whole story, rather than get half a truth. This is something that carried through to my professional life; getting involved in work that wasn’t necessarily my job, because I was interested in knowing the answer.”

Her Masters’ studies included exploring how the brain functions, genetics, infectious diseases, and their influence on human behaviour. But she became disillusioned by how she felt academia appeared guarded about sharing data that could be useful to others, even in the context of public health.

After spending time travelling, she started her career in the marketing department of retailer Argos, looking after branding and began to understand the psychology of making purchases. She later moved to a recruitment company, and built her marketing career in that sector, setting up and running an internal marketing agency, executing hiring campaigns for clients across many critical national infrastructure and technology sectors.

One such customer was current employer, Createc. “I ran their marketing and was fascinated by what they did. I interviewed the computer vision team and heard about its plans for an anonymous crowd monitoring system for train stations. I remember I went home that evening with my brain buzzing; that academic spark for research was reignited.”

Rosie later worked for cyber security company WithSecure, as a global go-to market manager, when Createc came calling. “I got a call from Matt, Createc’s founder, and he said: ‘I think we need someone like you’. I loved my current role, it was a big role in a big company in a cutting-edge sector, but I just couldn’t turn down the opportunity to work with such an interesting company and team.

“I joined Createc and immediately started working on what became Situate, and could see how the time was right for the crowd monitoring system to be used in stations and airports. I chatted to as many people as I could and got involved in developing the technology behind it.”

Today, Rosie is Product and Strategy Director for Createc, leading commercial product and service development on a global scale across the company’s specialisms in sensing and robotics.

Most recently, she’s been working to develop new functionality in the Situate system to detect violence against women and girls in public places. The new features will detect loitering, following and other related behaviours, helping to make journeys safer for women and girls on public transport. Her ambition, she adds, is use the crowd monitoring technology to provide “masses of safety and security benefits to public life, and improve people’s journeys around connected cities.

“I want our product to make a global impact in the transport sector, as well as for shopping centres and stadia – anywhere with a need to better understand how people move, to keep them safe and secure. We are just getting started and luckily for us at the same time the world is realising just how essential technologies like this is.”

Entrepreneurs need to be passionate about what they are doing, she adds. “When you are working on something that can have a positive impact on everyone’s lives, it feels incredibly worthwhile.”

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