Social Distancing and Contact Tracing IoT Solution
Empowered Employees
Prevention of Spread
Testing and Iteration
3.600 End Users Protected
Safe Return to Work Made Easy With IoT
In order to stay resilient during the pandemic and comply with the new regulations of doing business, all businesses have to address the problem of how they can protect their workforce. 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 downtime. Since Otokoç Otomotiv employs a large workforce in their facilities, tracking their compliance to social distancing using manual methods would be too time consuming and prone to error. The goal was to find a way to automate social distancing as well as contact tracing by using data-based methods to track social distance violations and estimate risk.
IoT Solution to Support Traditional Social Distancing and Contact Tracing Methods
In collaboration with MESS (Turkish Employers’ Association of Metal Industries), Boni Global developed an IoT solution that allows for distance tracking and monitoring compliance and violations through a management panel. Employees and visitors can be 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.
The solution was tested in 8 Otokoç Otomotiv locations and 383 end users with successful results. Afterwards, the solution usage was expanded to 78 other locations reaching a total of 3.600 users.