00:00:00/Glossary
Dwell time
Dwell time is how long a person stays in a defined area, measured from the moment they enter it to the moment they leave. The same number gets read two very different ways, depending on who's asking.
The retail reading
In a shop, dwell time is an engagement signal. Thirty seconds at a display means something different from a glance in passing, a long wait at the till is a warning, and a promotion nobody stops at is a promotion that isn't working. Where footfall counts the people, dwell time says what held their attention once they were in.
The safety and operations reading
Elsewhere the same measurement carries a different worry. Someone lingering by a fire exit or the stockroom door, a vehicle sitting at the loading dock long past its slot, a person who's been in one spot far longer than the space calls for. Here dwell time is a nudge for someone to take a look rather than a marketing metric, and it tends to arrive as an alert on screen or by email.
How it's measured from cameras
The cameras already covering an area see when a person arrives in it and when they go, so AI reading the footage can time the stay. In Svid the Footfall & Dwell Time check does this, enabled per camera on the areas worth timing.
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