The injection of capital made by educational institutions to improve the conditions of their sports centers is not limited to reforming their infrastructure, since the security factor also deserves special attention.
By Security Sales
In 2013, the National Autonomous University of Honduras (UNAH) confirmed the inauguration of its new sports complex, where more than 700 million lempiras (almost 30 million dollars) were invested. Thanks to this improvement, the educational institution has an athletics stadium that has the capacity to accommodate 7,000 spectators. Additionally, the University Palace of Sports was created, which has a multipurpose court, classrooms and gymnasium.
More recently, the National University of Engineering of Peru (UNI) announced in November 2017 the start of the remodeling works of its new sports venue, where almost 2 million soles (around 610 thousand dollars) will be invested. This project also seeks to provide the university with a space that responds to current sports demands, so that the educational community is motivated to carry out this type of activities.
The above are just two cases that show a trend in Latin America: the realization of important investments by educational institutions to structurally improve their wellness centers and thus offer better services, which at the same time could generate additional resources for universities.
But these modifications are not limited only to the scope of the infrastructure of the sports venues. The security factor is also of great relevance, and that is why the aforementioned entities are constantly dedicated to finding solutions that ensure that those who visit their campuses – either permanently or occasionally – are not affected by any dangerous situation, while guaranteeing an agile and controlled entry.
But having large sports centers not only generates economic and well-being benefits for the educational community, it also proposes two very important challenges for institutions. In the first place, the fact that these spaces are of great magnitude makes them more prone to the entry of unauthorized personnel, with the consequent risks that this situation entails.
Additionally, as a second challenge, there is the imminent need to find tools that allow optimizing and streamlining access for the growing number of authorized users. This requirement is of vital importance especially for those scenarios that are thinking of being used for large events.
Due to these needs, we currently find that different universities – worldwide – have been implementing different technologies that allow them to systematize the access control of their users and their income flow.
American University, an example of avant-garde
This is how we find the case of the University of Southern Georgia (United States), whose recreational activities center (RAC, for its acronym in English) has been consolidated as the interaction space of the campus, receiving approximately 5,000 students per day.
The influx of visitors and its large dimensions made the RAC think of implementing, for access control, full-height turnstiles and Boon Edam doors that would allow entry to the growing number of users. But this did not stop there, and in 2006 these teams were accompanied by fingerprint scanning technology to authenticate the identity of each person.
In 2014 this story takes a new turn, since the directors of the RAC decided to evaluate the possibility of integrating an optical scanner to the access control software they were using at the time. All this motivated by Iris ID's IrisAccess solutions that had already been implemented in two university canteens.
The goal was to keep the sports center safe. At the same time, it was intended to improve the flow of income of visitors, who went from requiring between five and 12 seconds to no more than two to enter the educational institution.
For the members of the institution, the performance of the Boon Edam tourniquet, added to the iris scanner, is practically perfect. For this reason, the university is motivating its associates to use this mechanism that managed to overcome the challenges of maintaining security and avoiding delays when entering the RAC.
Unquestionably, the innovative spirit and the desire for constant improvement has made both the University of Georgia and other educational institutions advance in terms of infrastructure and, of course, security, to put in the hands of their communities high-level spaces and with the guarantee that only authorized persons will be able to access these sports centers.
