The impact of the pandemic is more than fuel for history books, it is the architect of the society to come. And many companies, universities, R&D groups and volunteers are helping in every way they can to fight this virus, prevent the further spreading of it, help the aid for it, and report about it.
We too, have put our efforts into brainstorming on what we could do, with the help of our technology, for the situation at hand. With 4 solutions on the table, in this article I'm focussing on creating an environment to get people back to work and help the economy starting up again. And this is for many reasons.
People at home have had enough of this isolation and social distance. They do start to get out more, and as much as they understand the situation, they will start spreading more and more.
I won't quote anything, but a web-search on "impact of pandemic on economy" should tell you enough on the situation if you would need further input to be convinced of the consequences.
If you are a business owner, you will have enough reasons for yourself.
As much as our governments are helping us on a financial level, somebody will have to pay for all this aid at a later stage.
Social distance - professional distance
As a company, we have a technology to build (IoT-) applications. These applications are fed by sensor data, or other events such as the push of a button on a smartphone app. We have ±100 apps already and at least 20 of them are tracking apps. Geofencing and event based registrations are a standard functionality in all of these.
Focussing on getting people back to work, we felt it could help if we could create a virtual dynamic geofence around a person. This can be done by smartphone apps, like Apple and Google are now co-operating on (what an architect this virus is), but for various reasons apps are not always the best solution for this. Maybe a smartphone is not allowed in your line of business. Not all BLE chips are of the same quality. You may have forgotten yours at lunch on this construction site. Or your kid might have switched of the BLE function when playing that game last night.
If we can help, for the next months - maybe even years - to come, by ensuring employees on the work-floor to keep a distance of 2 meters of each other, it could prevent further spreading and allow starting up the economy again faster.
There are a few configurations possible and we cover almost all of them (BLE, RFID, Cellular, LoRaWAN, ...) but I will not get into detail here. The principle concept is this: If you can give a personal tracker to your employee, we create a bubble of x meters around him/her. When bubbles overlap, the tracker will sound a warning message and we log this in the backend platform. The 2 employees will take a distance from each other immediately. And if at some point in the future you would have somebody test positive, you can backtrack who he was in close contact with and ask them to go for a test as well.
All this can be done on a national network, data can be anonymised, but it is just as easy to set up a private network (to ensure that your employee feels more Private-Data protected) by installing a LoRaWAN gateway.
We have partners all over the world offering this now and various configurations can be set up. We call this app "Let's make [country the partner is in] great again"
There is an article on the subject in this newspaper. Dutch link - English translated link
Partners offering this are in Belgium, Lithuania, USA, Holland, Australia,
Bert Vanaken