How one of Europe's largest congresses measured real visitor engagement

Event organizers often struggle to measure attendee engagement inside large conference venues. They know how many tickets were sold and maybe how many badges were scanned at the door, but not which sessions kept people in their seats or which posters people actually stopped to read. Exhibitors have their own methods, counting leads, tracking conversations, but these give only a partial picture. They say little about visitor flow patterns, peak hours, or how footfall at a given booth compares to the previous edition. As budgets get tighter, that partial picture is no longer enough; sponsorship value, room planning, and future event design increasingly depend on measurable attendee engagement rather than assumptions.

The European Alliance of Associations for Rheumatology (EULAR) ran into exactly this challenge. To address it, EULAR selected a solution combining Terabee’s GDPR-compliant people sensing technology with the akenza IoT platform, enabling live occupancy analytics and data-driven insights across the congress.

EULAR organizes the European Congress of Rheumatology, one of the largest medical conferences in Europe (13.5k visitors in 2025), and wanted to understand how attendees actually engaged with the event. For example, which poster presentations drew the most attention, which sessions held their audience, and how people filled the space. To do so, they looked for a solution that was fully GDPR-compliant and that could accommodate a temporary setup with fast installation and removal.

114 sensors at ExCeL London

For the 2026 edition at ExCeL London, Terabee deployed a sensor network covering both posters and session rooms, with data managed and visualized through the akenza IoT platform. Terabee installed 114 sensors in total: 61 OCCUPANCY sensors placed at poster stations to measure attendance and identify which posters attracted the most attention throughout the day, covering approximately 364 posters in total, and 53 FLOW sensors mounted above session room entrances to count entries and early exits. All of this ran on LoRaWAN, using Terabee's gateways connected to The Things Network, so nothing had to plug into the venue's IT infrastructure. The akenza IoT platform managed the devices and decoded the incoming sensor data, turning it into a live dashboard with a 3D digital twin of the event layout. Terabee's sensors also come in HTTP and MQTT variants, and akenza supports both alongside a broad range of other protocols.

Fast setup and lasting benchmarks

The on-site installation and sensor configuration took only about two and a half days. The preparation behind it moved quickly too: Terabee’s experts completed the full project setup in roughly one week, including registering 114 sensors on the akenza IoT platform, building the dashboard, configuring the rules, and reproducing the venue's 3D map. End to end, the full project ran about three weeks, covering floor plan analysis, installation planning, stakeholder coordination, and dashboard and KPI definition.

EULAR's team accessed the dashboard live during the congress and received a post-event report, providing a detailed view of attendee engagement patterns across posters and sessions. By combining anonymous people sensing with live analytics, the solution provided EULAR with measurable insights that can support future event planning, from understanding attendee behavior to comparing engagement trends across editions. As 2026 is the second year running the setup, the collected data is also helping build a reliable benchmark over time. All of this was achieved without cameras or personally identifiable data, ensuring that EULAR’s GDPR requirements were fully respected.

“Renting Terabee sensors enabled EULAR to collect tangible data on visitors’ engagement. The data, collected on akenza, enabled us to understand the triggers for a more profound and strong visitor engagement while respecting privacy.”

— Emmanuel Roche, EULAR