Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, when Vivacity Labs, operating on behalf of the Department, first used cameras that use artificial intelligence to monitor pedestrians to improve the collection of social distancing data in Cambridgeshire.

Vivacity Labs is one of many COVID-19 related projects funded through UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The Vivacity Labs project referred to was supported through the Innovate UK COVID-19 call for business-led innovation in response to global disruption due to the pandemic.

Vivacity Labs used smart sensors that do not pick up images to monitor road usage.

The data sets being used in this project date from April 2019. This project is applying a new algorithm to this existing data and analyses the spatial differences (gaps, interactions etc.) between different modes of transport and not individuals.