When social distancing is required to lower the risk of catching a virus, such as in Covid-19 outbreak, it may be difficult for factory owners to track all of their employees. Estimote, a Bluetooth location beacon startup, has created a new range of wearable devices that will allow a business owner to monitor their workers remotely and control the COVID-19 outbreak in their workplace.
The devices are called “Proof of Health” wearables, reports TechCrunch. The wearables aim to provide monitoring the potential spread of the coronavirus from person-to-person – at the level of a local workplace facility. It has a contact tracing dashboard and Bluetooth devices, which are worn by employees. The devices worn employees have buttons, LED indicators, and they come in waterproof and industrial grade silicone casings.
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With the button, the employees log their health status in real-time. The employer can store up to six weeks of exposure data, work with a “locally stored and secure employee graph database”, and “easily manage quarantine periods” using exposure data.
The devices are intended to come in various form factors. The pebble-like version that is now in use, can be clipped to a lanyard for wearing and displaying around a person’s neck. This design is already in production and 2,000 will be deployed now, with a plan to ramp production for as many as 10,000 more in the near future. The company hopes to manufacture these in two more designs in the future: a wrist-worn device with an integrated adjustable strap and another one in the form of a card that’s easier to carry and could work alongside traditional security badges often used for accessing workplaces, the TechCrunch report said.
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“This stack has been in full production for 18 months,” Steve Chaney, co-founder of Estimote, told TechCrunch. “We can program all wearables remotely (they’re LTE connected). Say a factory deploys this — we write an app to the wearable remotely. This is programmable IoT.
