Contact-less Front Desk - Enabling Social Distancing

Kios Emulator - First page
Person detected by Meraki camera
Check in confirmed
New webex room created

Inspiration

Our global community is experiencing unprecedented times due to the COVID-19 pandemic and social distancing will remain moving forward, resulting in the need for technologies to evolve to allow for more contactless user experiences. Our idea is to implement a contactless check-in experience for hotel guests to protect the health and safety of both the guests and staff.

What it does

Meraki camera detects person as soon as guest enters hotel lobby. Real time snapshot is sent to the backend system for identification. If the person is identified as new guest, prompt will appear on the Kiosk asking user to scan QR code. Once QR code is verified, check-in information is provided to guest. Simultaneously a new Webex Teams Space is created where guests can reach out to various hotel staff. This provides a seamless and contactless user experience at hotels.

How we built it

Using Meraki MV Sense API we built the person detector. We also used Meraki camera API to take the live snapshot which will be sent to a backend database for identification. We used Webex Teams API to create a new Space for every new check-in. Our core application is built in Python3. We built the UI to emulate the kiosk using react, type script, and materials.

Challenges we ran into

One challenges was using the MV Sense API. We had to create polling app to continuously monitor the camera to detect a person.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We collaborated with different members for the first time, yet worked in harmony. We are very proud of that and eventually had a lot of fun.

What we learned

Most of the team members got firsthand experience to work with Meraki APIs and webex teams APIs which was great. Some of us were new to programming and this was a great opportunity to learn some programming skills.