How Heimdal works

Heimdal answers one question all day: who walked in, and when did they leave. It answers it at the door, on a phone or tablet already sitting there, without asking anyone to touch a screen.

At the door

A spare iPhone or iPad becomes the kiosk. It pairs to its door with a short code shown on the screen, so setting up a second entrance is a two minute job rather than a site visit.

The kiosk captures a face as the person walks up. There is no blink challenge and no button to press, because a queue forms behind anyone who has to perform something. Several people arriving together are recognised at the same time. In a dim doorway it offers the device light so a face can still be read. When two people look alike, it asks which one it is instead of guessing, and it checks for a photo or a screen held up to the camera.

On the device

The match happens on the device itself. The image never leaves the kiosk, which means the sensitive part of this system has a very short journey: camera, chip, decision. Devices with a graphics chip finish sooner, which is most of them.

What leaves the device is the event: this person, this door, this time.

When the network drops

A door does not stop being a door when the connection does. The kiosk records arrivals with the network down and sends them when it returns.

That is the easy half. The hard half is what happens next: two devices can each hold a version of the same morning, and the server has to reconcile them without inventing an arrival that never happened or losing a departure. Anyone who arrived but never scanned out is closed out automatically at the end of the day, in the organisation’s own timezone, so a day starts and ends locally.

What the office sees

The dashboard shows who is present and who is missing today. Behind it is a logbook of visits and time events with search, and an export to CSV that can be filtered to a single group. Scans the kiosk could not place go to one list, where staff name them or clear them, rather than disappearing.

Guardians get a watch page with a push notice on arrival and departure, with no sign up and no app: a link, or a printed QR code.

The paperwork

Enrolment asks for consent and stores the exact wording the person agreed to, not a tick against a policy that has since been edited. Consent forms and agreements can be printed, along with a report of the data held on a member. Sensitive actions are written to an audit trail administrators can read. A facility that would rather hold its own records can keep them in a data store it owns.

Face data is the kind of data you have to be able to explain years later. That is why this section exists at all.