Arçelik
Social Distancing and Contact
Tracing Via Wearable Devices
and Mobile Application
Data-Driven Contact Tracing
Prevention of Spread
Testing and Iteration
26.000 End Users Protected
26.000 end users were reached with the solution after the successful initial testing.
Safe Return to Work For Manufacturing Facilities
Arçelik A.Ş. is a Turkish multinational household appliances manufacturer. The company engages in the production and marketing of durable goods, components, consumer electronics and after-sale services. Arçelik offers products and services around the world with its 30,000 employees, 22 different production facilities in 8 countries (Turkey, Romania, Russia, South Africa, Thailand, Bangladesh, India and Pakistan), its 51 sales and marketing companies in 43 countries all over the world and its 12 brands (Arçelik, Beko, Grundig, Blomberg, ElektraBregenz, Arctic, Leisure, Flavel, Defy, Dawlance,Altus and Voltas-Beko) serving products and services in more than 145 countries. Since Arçelik employs a large workforce across their numerous facilities, tracking their compliance to social distancing and contact tracing using manual methods would be too time consuming and prone to error. The solution also had to be affordable, saleable, manageable and quickly deployed for it to be scaleable.
Digital Tools to Complement Traditional Social Distancing and Contact Tracing Methods
Within the scope of COVID-19 pandemic, ‘’Social Distance’’ entered our agenda. To continue their operations, all businesses have to address the problem of how they can protect their workforce as they safely return to work. Due to the increased risk of transmission after reaching a certain distance between people, there is a need to control it, record it and put in place a warning mechanism within their facilities. Also, having any COVID-19 case confirmed within the workforce could mean up to 2 months of production downtime. Relying only on the testimony of the person exposed to COVID-19 can produce inaccurate filiation reports because they may not remember all of their interactions. The goal was to find a viable way to automate social distancing as well as contact tracing by using data-based methods to track social distance violations and estimate risk.
Contact Tracing and Social Distancing Automation With Wearable Devices for Safe Return to Work
Boni Global and MESS (Turkish Employers’ Association of Metal Industries) collaborate to develop MESS Safe – a wearable Bluetooth device – emerged as a comprehensive workplace safety solution that helps to maintain social distancing in workplaces that also allows monitoring compliance and violations through a cloud based management panel and wearable device management via mobile app. Employees and visitors are assigned anonymous ID tags and wearable devices. The devices activate when they are in risky close proximity to another device and communicate with signals using Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) technology, which allows for interactions to be monitored on the management panel without tracking the location of the user. The users are notified through their wearable devices with an auditory and visual warning sign when they initially break social distance. If a signal is detected for some period, the user’s social distance score decreases accordingly, which they can see from the complementary mobile application. If a COVID-19 case is confirmed in the workplace, the management can track every social interaction of that employee to see who else is at risk and take precautions. During the development of the solution, Arçelik granted not only access to their facilities to test and iterate the product, but also took part in identifying the best-fit supplier and sourcing of the Bluetooth based wearable IoT devices offering their supplier network. These summed up into Arçelik providing tremendous add-value to the product in terms of product validation, supply chain and improvements by continuous live testing.
