February 21, 2020, marks the start of the pandemic in Italy that has changed our daily habits and how we think about personal and general safety. To what extent technology could help us cope with such an impossible situation was the first question we asked ourselves and has stayed with us since. It is also the reason we agreed to contribute to the birth of LEO, a product conceived by Wi4b for the end of lockdown. Thanks to software for analysing environments and a wide-angle camera, LEO can detect situations of non-compliance with interpersonal distancing, signalling them with an optical and acoustic warning. Based on a neural network, the solution implements machine learning and computer vision algorithms that use artificial intelligence to detect people and map their presence and distribution over a wide area in real-time. LEO is named after Leonardo da Vinci; such an association of ideas guided us in conceiving a shape with a strong personality and yet blends delicately into its surroundings. Its icosidodecahedron body is a tribute to the illustrations Leonardo made for De Divina Proportione and tells of a functional simplicity intertwined with the fascination of the logical complexity of its software, at the service of needs born from an emergency that requires everyone to give their contribution.
