Monitoring People Moving during Covid-19 Pandemic in the Emilia-Romagna Region

This paper is about monitoring people movements in Emilia-Romagna : the region of Italy in which our company, Lepida ScpA, is located. The unfortunate event of the 2020 pandemic triggered by the Covid-19 virus gave us the chance to exploit our BIGDATA infrastructure to provide information to the regional Public Administration (PA) in order to take strategic decisions to face the emergency. This goal actually corresponds to the aim with which we started last year to design and implement our infrastructure. Our monitoring project is grounded on our regional WiFi infrastructure. This WiFi access is provided for free to anyone and it is available in all major cities and municipalities over Emilia-Romagna. We describe the challenges we faced and the choices we made during the process and the final results we achieved.