---
lang: en
title: "Footfall heatmaps, zone traffic and dwell time"
url: https://nabrio.com/use-cases/footfall-heatmaps-and-dwell-time
canonical: https://nabrio.com/use-cases/footfall-heatmaps-and-dwell-time
updated: 2026-10-27
publisher: Nabrio Co., Ltd. (nabrio.com)
---

# Footfall heatmaps, zone traffic and dwell time

Nara tracks people through your space and shows visits per zone, paths and heatmaps, so you can see which areas, stores and displays attract or lose traffic. Dwell time and head pose show how long people stay and where they look.

- Sectors: [Retail](https://nabrio.com/industries/retail.md), [Manufacturing](https://nabrio.com/industries/manufacturing.md)
- What it takes: Ready to configure. Works with Nara’s built-in models. You set up the zones, rules and outputs.
- Products: [Nara](https://nabrio.com/nara.md)

## The problem

Operators can count visitors, but cannot see where they go, how long they stay or what catches their attention.

## How it works

- **Input:** Cameras over stores, aisles or work areas
- **Process:** Tracking for visits per zone, paths and dwell time; head pose and gaze for attention
- **Action:** Heatmaps and engagement on dashboards, with data stored for analysis

Nara tracks each person across the camera view, counts visits per zone, measures how long people stay, and builds heatmaps of where they go. Head pose and gaze estimation shows where people look, such as at a display, window or screen. Results are stored in the database and shown on dashboards.

## Variations

### Zone traffic and heatmaps

Visits per zone, paths and heatmaps show which areas, stores and displays attract or lose traffic.

### Engagement: dwell time and attention

Time spent in each zone, and where people look, measure engagement per display or campaign.

### Factory operations analytics

Dwell time per zone, heatmaps, cycle times, and people and vehicle movement show bottlenecks, idle stations and movement waste.

## What you need

- Cameras over the areas you want to measure
- A PC, server or NVIDIA Jetson running Nara

## Nara building blocks

- Camera nodes
- People detection
- Tracker with zone counts, dwell time and heatmap
- Head pose and gaze
- Database table
- Dashboard

AI models: [Object tracking and analytics](https://nabrio.com/nara/ai-models.md), [Head pose and gaze](https://nabrio.com/nara/ai-models.md), [People detection](https://nabrio.com/nara/ai-models.md)

## What it improves

- Store and display performance
- Layout decisions
- Bottlenecks removed in operations

## Where it runs

- [120+ cameras and 20+ AI capabilities in one mall system](https://nabrio.com/customers/shopping-mall-ai-vision.md) (A shopping mall in Bangkok)

## Frequently asked questions

### Can we use the cameras we already have?

Usually, yes. Nara reads standard IP cameras over RTSP, as well as Basler industrial cameras, USB webcams and video files.

### Does any video leave the site?

No. Nara processes video on your own hardware. Data is sent elsewhere only if you build a flow that sends it, for example an alert to your own MQTT broker.

## Related use cases

- [People counting](https://nabrio.com/use-cases/people-counting.md)
- [Visitor demographics](https://nabrio.com/use-cases/visitor-demographics.md)
- [Queue monitoring](https://nabrio.com/use-cases/queue-monitoring.md)

Talk to us about heatmaps and dwell time: sales@nabrio.com. [Download Nara](https://nabrio.com/download.md).