< PreviousOf course, the online world has been a saviour throughout lockdown when it comes to essential and non-essential retail shopping as well as accessing essential services, not to mention enabling mass working from home. But now as we gradually return to a more normal way of life, further innovation is required. A key challenge is in allowing sufficient scope for people to go about their daily lives – be this going to the office or school, airport, station, shops or concert - while still maintaining a sensible level of protection from potential virus infection. Whereas personnel with hand-held temperature scanners are often overwhelmed during peak times and, therefore, are somewhat inefficient in large crowd situations, standalone temperature screening kiosks offer greater ability for safeguarding public health. With this situation, leading kiosk providers are rising to the challenge to help facilitate the transition from lockdown to the ‘new normal’ way of life. One such area revolves around the launch of solutions for enabling safe passage for people when entering offices, public buildings, entertainment venues and a host of other ‘bricks and mortar’ facilities. Access security control kiosks with integrated fever screening functionality harness leading-edge technologies such as artificial intelligence, facial recognition and thermal imaging to deliver very efficient, all-in-one real-time temperature detection and ID security verification. In time, by acting as a first line of defence to protect staff, visitors and customers, these types of kiosk solutions are likely to become as commonplace and routine as personal bag security checking. They can be easily deployed in large office premises, airports, rail stations, restaurants and shops as well as sports, leisure and entertainment venues. However, their wide-scale user acceptance is dependent on these solutions being designed and optimised for accuracy, speed, safety and sheer user convenience – all without compromising the customer organisation’s need for health safety, access control and efficiency. Need for speed Key usability design factors and considerations must include contactless operations while the processing speed of each user ‘transaction’ is essential - particularly in the case of larger office buildings, as well as airports, railway platforms and other locations involving large crowd processing. post Covid-19 30 KIOSK solutionsConsider the resources required to manage not only employees, but also visitors, guests and suppliers requiring entry to your building Any unnecessary delay using a kiosk access control solution can quickly create user frustration and also adversely impact throughput. Anything over five seconds to complete a temperature screening is likely to be unviable but at this mark, will allow processing of around 700 hundred people per hour via a single kiosk – including the time need- ed to approach the camera, perhaps removing glasses, facing the camera and receiving the results. This number can be increased significantly by deploying multiple kiosks in high volume areas. Enabling connection to automatic doors, turnstiles, locks or barriers can further streamline the access control process. Clearly, accuracy of temperature measurement is a prerequisite. This demands intelligent sensor technology using hundreds of measuring points. Equally important is the machine’s ability to track the distance between the subject and the sensor and that accurate measurement is within acceptable range. Preventing any user interference during temperature screening must also be taken into consideration. In practice As part of post Covid-19 ‘business as usual’ strategies, there are numerous potential applications for temperature- based access control kiosks. However, as countless millions of people return to work, one of the most important access security concerns will be controlling entry to large office buildings which house large or multiple businesses. Consider the resources required to manage not only employees, but also, numerous visitors, guests and suppliers requiring buildings entry every single day. However, there is a solution. A more efficient process occurs when visitors/customers are invited by an organisation to pre-register online and then upon arrival (in the outer lobby, for example), they proceed directly to the access kiosks for authorisation. This is a two-step verification process - matching facial recognition with personal photo ID (passport/driver’s licence) and simultaneously performing a temperature reading. On successful ID and temperature verification, RFID cards or ID badges are dispensed/printed by the kiosk, enabling user access to the premises and specific areas within it. If a fever is identified, an on-screen alert will advise the person to contact reception. Essentry, a global provider of access control solutions for enterprise applications, has calculated that in large enterprises managing a single visit can take 30 minutes on average per guest - when involving the receptionist, host, and administrative staff. By automating tasks at every stage and assuming an initial online pre-registration has already taken place. This leaves reception staff free to focus on more valuable tasks and allows event hosts to save time through a much faster registration process. Personal ID and temperature access authorisation approaches could also be used in a variety of settings, such as airports and train stations, hospitals, universities and entertainment venues. Maximising kiosk ‘afterlife’ While mindful of the need to ensure the health safety and security of their staff, customers, guests and suppliers, many buildings and venue operators are also concerned with maximising ROI. They want to be certain of product longevity and lifecycle with the opportunity to accommodate other interactive applications in the future – perhaps when having as many health screening kiosks available is no longer necessary. Similarly from an ROI perspective, opportunities to quickly retrofit existing kiosks with thermal imaging, biometric facial recognition camera technology or any other new features can deliver the appropriate value. Therefore, a modular design approach is preferable for allowing greater scope for both retrofit and customisation. This provides the flexibility to add and change peripherals and devices to suit current requirements - audio navigation keypads, cameras and microphones, and peripherals such as payment systems, scanners and printers to be easily housed under the screens. Furthermore, touchscreens, computer units and peripherals that can be more easily and quickly changed will also facilitate repairs and upgrades. The ability to easily swap-out and plug- in processors and components rather than facing the disruption and costs of complete kiosk replacement will be an obvious advantage for all concerned. Post-coronavirus, temperature- based access control kiosks will become increasingly used and accepted. After all, they help provide additional peace- of-mind to us all as we strive to regain control of our daily lives. At the same time, for buildings owners and operators, investing in modular kiosk solutions offers future-proof applications with flexibility and greater extension of product lifetime. n post Covid-19 KIOSK solutions 31Contactless technology is proving invaluable during the current coronavirus pandemic – avoiding the need to exchange cash or press buttons on a chip-and-pin machine. But for many businesses the only option for taking a customer’s initial order without face-to-face contact is a touchscreen. But that actually risks spreading infection more widely. Could the latest audio technology provide a contactless solution? By Dave Betts, Chief Science Officer, AudioTelligence DO NOT TOUCH! Making touchscreens touch-free touchless touchscreens 32 KIOSK solutionsens With COVID-19 here to stay for the foreseeable future, businesses emerging from lockdown are having to find new, safe ways of servicing their customers – and safe means hygienic. When it comes to touchscreen kiosks, that includes things like antibacterial coatings. But that's missing an important factor. The kiosk has to be perceived to be safe and hygienic by customers, as well as being genuinely safe and hygienic. An anti- COVID coating is not likely to cut it for the general public as many people won't trust it, no matter how good it really is. So could the latest audio technology provide a contactless solution? Instead of going through an on-screen menu pressing icons, if customers could simply talk to the kiosk and ask for a burger and chips, use contactless payment and then pick up their order from a service counter, the amount of physical contact would be minimised to a single one-way contact from the short order chef to the customer. The whole process would also be faster – reducing still further the risk of anyone coming into contact with the virus. touchless touchscreens KIOSK solutions 33However, there are two drawbacks with this scenario – the first is general background noise and the second is other people at neighbouring kiosks who will be making additional noise as they place their own orders. Automatic speech recognition (ASR) has been around for decades and reliability is increasing all the time, although it is most reliable on limited vocabulary systems. But that's fine as most kiosks only need a limited vocabulary anyway. However, if you add in a noisy environment with lots of other people around, things are not so great for ASR. And, of course, touchscreen kiosks are often in high street shops with a high customer footfall – and therefore far from being quiet. It's also likely there will be several kiosks together – so how can you ensure that a customer's order for burger and chips doesn’t get mixed up with the person at the neighbouring kiosk ordering chicken nuggets? And what if their child tries to add a sneaky ice cream to the order? Artificial intelligence It's tempting to think that noise suppression is the answer – after all, there have been some amazing advances in the last few years, fuelled by the artificial intelligence revolution. The results can be great if the signal was already clearly intelligible. But if you listen to what a microphone picks up in a noisy shopping mall, it is hard for a human being to understand the raw speech – let alone an ASR system. And that’s exactly where noise suppression falls down – it can’t pull out the speech cleanly from such high noise levels. You might think beamforming holds the key – but this is surprisingly difficult to do well, unless you are willing to invest in a large number of expensive calibrated microphones. In general, unlike noise suppression, beamforming can provide some improvement in intelligibility – but nowhere near enough for a general high- volume kiosk. This is where blind source separation (BSS) comes into its own. It simply needs between four and eight off-the- shelf microphones, with no calibration required – the sort of microphone found in a mobile phone. The array geometry is flexible – anything between 5cm and 30cm across. Ideally there would be a clear 'line of sight' to the customer and, if space allows, a 2D array is preferable – but a linear array does also work. Customer's voice BSS can separate the incoming audio back into its constituent sources automatically. So not only is the customer's voice brought out of the background noise, it is clearly distinguished from the voice of the person at the neighbouring kiosk. It can even separate the voice of the customer from their child trying to add that sneaky ice cream. touchless touchscreens 34 KIOSK solutionsIs it time to put a 'do not touch' sign on our touchscreens? This is all done with data-driven machine learning. The system is continuously analysing the sound field and can pick out the speech of the person in front of the kiosk – adapting automatically to the lunchtime rush or the quiet of a 2am motorway pitstop. Just like a human – but no social distance required. As the concepts behind BSS are mathematical, it can be implemented on any general computing device. The central processing unit (CPU) cost is well within the capabilities of a modern ARM processor that supports single precision floating point. Then it needs memory – as BSS is a data-driven approach, it needs a frame store to keep all the audio it’s analysing. For 16kHz and eight microphones, that frame store could be as much as 40MB – totally within the capabilities of a modern ARM processor. Optionally, a camera with face detection can help ensure the correct customer is selected. Then there’s the ASR and speech-to- intent system. Google managed to port its speech recognition system (currently English only) on to a pixel phone in less than 80MB of memory. Similarly, specialist multilingual speech-to-intent systems for a limited vocabulary can be implemented in under 500kB of memory, depending on the size of the vocabulary. Upselling options There's no need to lose existing touchscreen benefits either – such as upselling options to maximise revenue. If a customer orders a burger and fries, for example, the screen can still prompt them and ask whether they want a cola with their order – with the customer speaking their reply. Dynamically tying this upselling to stock levels would also help reduce wastage – and data mining could ensure the best options are offered. The one area that speech doesn’t particularly help with is payment, as privacy is likely to be an issue. Very few customers will be happy with announcing their credit card details or how much they are spending. Thankfully, contactless payment is already here – but the new EU Payment Services Directive means that kiosks are going to have to resort to the keypad for customer authentication more often, unless a different solution can be embraced. There are plenty of alternatives. For larger amounts, various companies have proposed payment systems based on face recognition. But perhaps a more practical approach is QR codes. These can be displayed directly on the screen for an app to display and read. All the personal security for the transaction is already contained in the smartphone with its fingerprint/facial recognition or simple access password/PIN. So it all seems to add up. In the post-pandemic world, perhaps it’s time to put a 'Do not touch' sign on our touchscreens… n touchless touchscreens KIOSK solutions 35solutions Customer Engagement Technology KIOSKNext >