Title: Hoarding and Crowd Control system
Inventor: Jason Leow (Invention was disclosed in SIDA WhatsApp committee group chat in 24 May 2020)
Note: This is an open invention. The inventor is giving away this invention to the general public for free. The inventor only seek for acknowledgement in his invention effort.
Special thanks to the following SIDA Committee members for their constructive feedback and suggestions.
George Chan: …May I ask how the HCCS handles the use case of train passenger who has to travel to and from work at stipulated times….
* Reply from inventor: To explain the procedure of how a person travel to and from work, I’ll put in a few scenario.
Scenario#1, Jamie is a nurse. She is an essential worker. On Sunday, she uses one HCCS token to book the Monday 0600 to 0800hr slot at Clementi station near her home (Similar to Fig 18). At same time, she extend the booking (Similar to Fig 43) to make another booking from 1800 to 2000hr (minus another token) so that she can travel home after work. Monday 6.30am, Jamie enter Clementi station with her token code and travel to her work place at Outram station. Jamie start her work. Around 1730hr, Jamie find that she needed to work overtime, so she goes into the HCCS to change the 1800 booking to become 2000 to 2200hr. She complete her work at 2000 and use the token code take the train back home to Clementi.
Scenario#2, Joe is an engineer. He is not an essential worker. On Sunday, he open the HCCS to book a time slot to travel to his work place by train. He cannot book the Monday 0600 to 0800hr at Clementi because he is not an essential worker (similar to Fig 18). He book a time slot for Monday 0800 to 1000hr. At the same time, he make an extend booking (similar to Fig 43) at 2000 to 2200hr for the return home trip. On Monday, Joe attend an online Zoom meeting at 0800hr for a morning briefing with his manager and team members. At 0830hr, Zoom meeting end. Joe goes to Clementi station at 0900hr and use the token code to board train and travel to Tuas station. Joe start work at 1000hr. Joe finished work at 2000hr and take train home. Joe’s manager will need to adjust the work schedule and distribute works accordingly.
Scenario#3: Peter is an engineer, he is also Joe’s colleague. He live near Queenstown station. Unlike Joe, he can book a time slot for 0600 to 0800hr and 1800 to 2000hr. So he can start his work as per usual practice. Peter is not an essential worker, why is it that he has access to these time slot? Reason is because there are not many essential workers living near the Queenstown station. Let’s assume that we want to control the number of people starting their day and entering each train station to less than 500 heads per two hours slot. If there are only 100 essential workers living near this station, there will be additional 400 places not used. So these additional places will be resigned to some of the non essential workers like Peter. As the outbreak reduce, it can be increased to 1000 heads per two hours slot.
Take note that I used a two hours time slots for easy illustration. It can also be 1hr or 30 minutes time slot.
George Chan: … As for the manual check of body temperature and train travel token at entry of train station, it will create congestion especially during the peak hours. To overcome this set back, you could consider the use thermal scanner with staff monitoring for check of body temperature and use of additional QR code readers at the fare gates to seamlessly manage train tokens…
* Reply from inventor: In the presentation, a hand held temperature scanner was used to scan passenger and its value is enter into the HCCS App. This information may become useful to identify the initial source of infection when there is a virus outbreak cluster within the train station. During peak hour, we may want to control the number of passengers entering the station at a low level for social distancing to be effective. This is important when our virus outbreak is going up or the number of infections is at a very high level. With this tight control, congestion will be a lesser problem. But when the situation stabilizes and we allow more passengers into the train, scanning temperature of passengers using the hand held scanner become less efficient. At this point, we can switch to thermal camera that can do mass detection of abnormal temperature in passengers. Thanks for the suggestion for using thermal camera.
George Chan: … With regards to your proposed solution for control of hoarding in minimart/supermart, my view is it is a difficult task to convince minimart/supermart operators to participate as it can result in loss of sales turnover…
* Reply from inventor: I am in agreement that it will be very difficult to convince super/mini-mart operators to participate in the HCCS App because of financial losses. That is why this invention target audience is Singapore government whose main concern is to curl the outbreak and save resident lives. This invention is meant to offer our government a different approach to control the COVID-19 outbreak. Whether they adopt it or not is the decision of our government and not the supermart operators. What I can say is that we are all living in a special situation, which means we may have to call for special solution.
George Chan: … The implement of limitation of purchase by NTUC Fairprice is a good solution. I feel that the recurrent of panic buying and hoarding is remote. Therefore I suggest that you leave out the feature of identifying shopper who hoard at minimart/supermart…
* Reply from inventor: I hope that your feeling of panic buying and hoarding being remote is correct. My feeling is that most Singapore residents will not do too much hoarding, but I also feel that it only take a certain percentage for our residents to do massive hoarding before the situation goes out of control. After all, we are all human with our fear, this is human nature. Looking at the recent situation in many agriculture based nations like Latin America and Indonesia, I am not optimistic on a global food supply chain. When food shortage strike, it may come really fast and we may not have time to react. That is why I decided to put this invention into our SIDA Open Invention Initiative. We may need to start building a system that can effectively control hoarding behavior. It may not be my invention, but we need to be ready. I understand that the concept of identifying each shopper for their purchases may sound like an intrusion of personal privacy. I also don’t like it. But if doing it can help lessen the effect of food shortage and save lives, I say let’s do it. These data collected should be only used during a virus outbreak situation. If the vaccine comes out and situation slowly gets better, these data should be deleted and the HCCS App should stop. It should be placed into an internal testing and revision status until the next virus outbreak occurs.
George Chan: … You may have come across “Beijing Subway begins reservation service” which indicated that Beijing’s subway system started a mobile reservation service in March 2020 at two of its busiest stations (Take Shahe and Tiantongyuan). The trial service comes amid the COVID-19 epidemic and is aimed at encouraging staggered shifts and reducing passengers’ waiting time during rush hour. I am unable to find out details on how the reservation service work.
The link for the article is https://news.cgtn.com/news/2020-03-06/Beijing-Subway-begins-reservation-service–OE6zfhYUBq/index.html …
* Reply from inventor: I thank you for sharing this information. I have not heard of this reservation system and how it works in China. I’ll keep a look out for more detail.
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