Open for business, closed for crowding: SafeSpace a Smart Solution

Public spaces, including shopping centres, restaurants, banks and offices, must grapple with how to offer easy access to the public while ensuring occupant safety and hygiene. We present SafeSpace, a modular smart-environment platform that gives administrators control over indoor density using appointment-based access, enforces physical distancing through proximity alerts in real-time, and verifies PPE adherence with on-device deep-learning mask detection. The system was developed using YOLOv3 and MobileNetV2 on Intel Core i5 CPU and Google Colab, and obtained 98% precision, recall, and F1-score on a real-world dataset. Real-time proximity alerts were implemented by employing YOLOv3 and ROI-based centroid distance estimation with an overall latency of 125–158 ms per frame. In addition, the simulated entry flow comparisons between walk-ins and a predetermined schedule indicated that peak occupancy was reduced by 38.24% during a 15-min interval. SafeSpace’s modular design and consolidated analytics dashboard also make it leveraged for other public-space scenarios and the next generation of post-pandemic facility management and day-to-day operational safety.