Two venues, 235,000+ attendees, 300 million data points: How Crowd Connected powered blue dot navigation, 70,000+ location targeted content notifications and actionable footfall analytics for the world’s largest healthcare event
“The results were outstanding: our highest-ever app users engaging with the interactive map. We’re thrilled with the data insights we’ve gained post-show.”
Rebecca Atack, Senior Event Manager, Informa Markets
The event: the world’s largest healthcare show
For more than five decades, World Health Expo (WHX), formerly Arab Health, has mirrored the transformation of the global healthcare industry.
Once a modest regional exhibition, it has evolved into one of the world’s most influential healthcare gatherings, bringing together policymakers, clinicians, innovators, manufacturers, investors and regulators from across the globe.
The 2026 edition can rightfully claim to be the largest event of its kind. Combined with the smaller WHX Labs (formerly Medlab), it spanned two vast venues in Dubai, welcoming over 235,000 visitors and 4,300 exhibitors from 180+ countries.
The challenge: new venue. No prior data. 235,000 visitors
The 2026 edition of WHX marked a significant turning point. The main event moved to the mammoth Dubai Exhibition Centre (DEC) in Expo City Dubai for the first time, while WHX Labs was located in the Dubai World Trade Center (DWTC).
Informa Markets President Peter Hall explained the scale of the challenge: “Space limitations at DWTC had forced the two events to operate separately for nearly a decade. The scale of DEC finally allows us to bring the ecosystem back together.”
This enabled Informa to run WHX 2026 at an unprecedented dual-venue scale. But this format created four key challenges from the outset:
- First event at a new, unfamiliar venue: visitors would need navigation support from day one, with no prior data to draw on.
- The sheer size of the event meant that exhibitors were housed in both permanent indoor infrastructure and temporary outdoor flexible pavilion space. Any navigational aids needed to cover the entire footprint.
- No prior visitor movement data, making it essential to capture 2026 behaviour to inform 2027 floor planning and exhibitor placement decisions.
- The large number of visitors meant that peak ingress/egress periods were a particular focus.
The solution: how it worked
The WHX Events mobile app, supplied by Swapcard, featured interactive maps provided by ExpoFP, and incorporated Crowd Connected’s positioning technology. This made the app ’location aware’, enabling blue dot navigation, and location-based in-app content.
GPS stops working the moment you go inside a building. Crowd Connected solves that problem, delivering the familiar “blue dot on a map” experience indoors – accurate to less than three metres across any venue, with no calibration or site survey required.
Practically, this means Crowd Connected’s onsite team only needs to install Bluetooth beacons across both venues – no cabling, no power connections – which was done during the final hours of build. Once beyond the beacons’ footprint, Crowd Connected’s technology seamlessly switches to GPS for all outdoor positioning.
The WHX team were provided with access to Crowd Connected’s web console, enabling real-time monitoring via a suite of interactive data visualisation tools, including heatmaps and charting. Informa’s digital marketeers used another module in the console to compose and target in-app location-based content. Crowd Connected provided show management with in-depth post-event reporting, diving deep into the data.
Navigation was prominently featured in all WHX communications. A creative mix of analogue and digital onsite signage heavily promoted the blue dot wayfinding capability of the app. Touch-screen digital map kiosks used the identical ExpoFP map for consistency with the app.
The results: navigation, engagement, and intelligence – delivered at scale
App adoption hit a record high – up a sensational 81% year-on-year – driven by two features above all: embedded ticketing and blue dot navigation. This was impressive in a region where event mobile app uptake historically has lagged.
The interactive map was the #2 most popular app feature on the opening day, used by 50% of all app users – demonstrating the value to visitors.
Over 70% of app users rated the blue dot navigation as “easy to use” with verbatim comments such as “Loving how great it is”.
Across five days, Crowd Connected processed almost 300 million positions – data which unlocked comprehensive footfall insights.
Location-based messaging was widely used to enhance the visitor experience, even before they had arrived onsite. Over 70,000 hyper-targeted push notifications were sent, with audience segments built using combinations of location and time. Creative use cases included targeting discount codes for ride-share apps exclusively to visitors still onsite after a certain time.
Footfall analytics delivered real-time and post-event measurement of traffic across every hall, zone, and individual location. This included exhibitor performance metrics for every booth across the two venues, giving the WHX commercial team hugely valuable insight used to underpin sales narratives for 2027.
Further analysis delivered:
- Smarter floor planning for 2027: hour-by-hour footfall variance by zone revealed which areas significantly outperformed projections.
- Exhibitor ROI evidence: clustering analysis identified high-performing booth locations across both venues.
- Cross-venue value proven: visitor crossover data confirmed that key exhibitors with presence at both DEC and DWTC attracted above-average dual visits.
- Entry point congestion analysis verified that specific interventions cut wait times by 25%.
Client testimonial
"Crowd Connected provided the technology behind the interactive map on our event app for WHX Dubai and WHX Labs, two large-scale healthcare shows, running concurrently across two huge venues here in Dubai. Working with their team was an absolute pleasure, incredibly easy to work with, professional, friendly, and always approachable.
This project marked what I believe to be their largest deployment of beacons ever, and Crowd Connected's team delivered it seamlessly and on time. The results were outstanding: we saw our highest-ever usage of the event app, with a significant percentage of attendees engaging with the interactive map and providing great feedback.
We're also thrilled with the data insights we've gained post-show, and our teams are excited to utilise Crowd Connected's insights as a sales tool moving forward. We look forward to continued collaboration with Crowd Connected and WHX to drive best practices for our organisation, clients, and attendees."
Planning a large-scale event and want to understand how Crowd Connected can solve your navigation, footfall analytics and location-based engagement challenges? Speak to our team, and we’ll show you what’s possible.
