Motion Sensor as people counter?

For my job I work with grass roots community groups and government entities in building a world where it’s easier to get around without a car. Often this takes the form of collecting data for departments like the city’s traffic engineering department or the parks departments. Often we have to count how many people use trails or pedestrian crossings at intersections. We do this because decision makers don’t like changing things without proof that it needs to happen, but they don’t really have a way of collecting non-vehicular counts.

Because of that I’m looking for a way to count people at key locations and I can’t help but wonder if the Wyze Cam and Motion Sensor could help. Buying professional/industrial grade people counters if very expensive and out of financial reach of grass roots groups. If some Wyze products could replace those expensive pieces I might be able to develop best-practices that we can share with other groups, maybe revolutionizing how we do people counts!

Do you think it’s possible to create a people counter using Wyze Cam and Motion Sensor? If so, how would you approach it? My big concern right now is tallying up how many times a motion sensor is triggered… is that possible?

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For situations like that I would try to use the cameras as a simple video collection system augmented by the motion sensors. This would allow use of the “professional counters” in a lab environment and if you find out the motion sensors ACCURATELY count people then use them.
But I would hate to base any valid study on the present state of the Wyze motion sensors.

Interesting. So you’d just capture motion detected video with the Wyze Cam, then use some system for counting the people afterward (all while testing Motion for accuracy)? I guess that means I could record all the motion video to an SD card and do all the counts later… any ideas on how I could automate the counting of people process? Is there a standard way to count them via software?
I guess even if I had to count people manually by watching all of the video clips it’d still be way, WAY faster than sitting along a trail (or at an intersection) and manually counting the number of people over the course of a day…

I wasn’t thinking so much as too the increase in speed but the comfort of a controlled environment versus being out in the “wild”.