Armored Things

Armored Things is a Boston-based startup building a predictive incident and emergency response platform for the Internet of Things (IoT) to try to keep people safe in large shared spaces like schools, stadiums, and streets. The company's technology combines data from existing security and IT systems with predictive analytics. Through the combination of data and analytics, it provides facilities management teams with a real-time visual representation of people and flow within a space.

According to president and co-founder Julie Johnson, "potential users of the software could be the chief security officer at a large venue or the person who’s running operations for Wimbledon or the World Cup."

The company's platform is a spatial intelligence platform collecting data from a broad range of sources, including data from WiFi, access control, video surveillance, and the Internet of Things. They apply machine learning for predictive analytics and visualizations to find solutions for overcrowding, people flow bottlenecks, and physical security concerns.

The platform is intended to simplify an organizations security and operations platform by integrating information from all sources into a single place.

The University of Tennessee Knoxville (UTK) used Armored Things to increase student safety on campus and help optimize their operations. The results of the partnership included increased situational awareness and improved incident response through Armored Things real-time analytics. They helped UTK identify space utilization trends to guide staffing and resource decisions. And they worked to increase existing returns on hardware investments. Joel Reeves, Assistant Vice Chancellor and Chief Information Officer at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, on Armored Things at UTK, said:

Their operations platform leverages a variety of components in our existing infrastructure to give us a real-time view of people movement across campus at any time.

The Los Angeles Football Club (LAFC) partnered with Armored Things to help LAFC make crowd control decisions, concessions staffing decisions, and security operations decisions with the return of fans during the COVID-19 pandemic. Armored Things platform will use existing video cameras and WiFi points to track movements and provide alerts when specific spaces become overcrowded or when social distancing protocols are being violated. Christian Lau, the LAFC and Banc of California Stadium Chief Technology Officer, on the partnership with Armored things, said:

It's just one component of our ultimate strategy around this type of system. When you think about Armored Things, it's really a back-end solutions for us to use.