Analysis of People Counting IoT solutions and possible expansions into the Industry 4.0 sector for Dropper s.r.l.

Modern entrepreneurship, in any sector, is characterized by a strong emphasis on the need for a continuous and accurate stream of data. This is not related solely to software-based products and companies, as the need for data can also refer to a number of Key Performance Indicators (KPI) and a lot of different information fundamental to the optimization of, for instance, manufacturing productive workflows. Different types of data can be provided by different instruments, but any company will involve a human resource, in the form of operators and/or users and customers, which means that people counters will always have an array of possible applications. Whether for the management and optimization of employees activities and paths, the validation and definition of marketing campaigns, or the study and analysis of crowd behaviours in congested areas, the People Counting and Crowd Management Systems industry has been expanding for a few years now, and has promise to become an ever-larger sector with encouraging growth margins (CAGR estimates between 10 and 13% in the next five years) reaching a $ 2 billion market by 2028, a growth and success that has only been improved and accelerated by the years of the pandemic. In this innovative and dynamic context, Dropper s.r.l. is a relative newcomer, a Turin-based startup formally founded in 2021 and currently hosted in the Incubatore delle Imprese Innovative del Politecnico di Torino (I3P), sporting a wide range of people counting and crowd management systems for various purposes for both private and public customers. This work will briefly analyse some of the key aspects of this industry, starting with a literature review of the state of the art in terms of both the central technologies instrumental to the people counting solutions, and then the actual solutions themselves, in their different generations, that have been developed and perfected over the last few years. This will be instrumental context to the analysis of the different devices and software offered in the specific instance of the Dropper manufacturer company, which will be displayed in the next chapter, and that will culminate in the final chapter, illustrating the current state, and possible developments, of application of the solutions to the optimization and improvement of a number of different industrial environments. Some concluding remarks will follow as a summary of the work done and the conclusions reached, and to comment on the potential for future expansions of the Dropper core business into said industrial environments.