As the world slowly heals from the COVID-19 pandemic, there is still a long way to go before we’ll be back to living how we did before the outbreak began. While the vaccine is good news to ending the pandemic, recently discovered variants of the novel coronavirus, as well as the vaccines’ effectiveness against them, have raised new concerns that we are not quite out of the woods yet. Therefore, manufacturers will most likely continue to ensure social-distancing requirements are met and conduct contact tracing quickly for the foreseeable future. But how can you achieve that on a bustling manufacturing floor?
Enacting social distancing and conducting contact tracing would be difficult enough without the world grappling with a global pandemic; safety professionals spend enough time advising manufacturers on how to avoid incidents as it is. However, it’s virtually impossible for most manufacturing operations to avoid their workers coming in close contact with one another—after all, unless a factory can afford automated technologies, odds are that most still rely on close human contact to run efficiently.
New wearable technology, however, provides an innovative way for factories to keep workers safe. These safety devices can play a vital role in both social distancing and contract tracing. Wearable technology sounds like something from the latest dystopian young adult novel, but the truth is actually closer to the non-fiction section. These devices do indeed have the same technology as those that could track someone, but they are only programmed to ping users to warn about proximity and servers to record that the two users were too close to one another.
Instead, they focus on measuring the physical distance between employees, signaling to let them know if they are forgetting to socially distance. The tracers also remember which other tracers they have been near during the course of a day, allowing human resources and public officials to quickly conduct contact tracing and identify anyone who may need to self-quarantine. In this way, the tracer is never monitoring or logging location data—a major privacy concern—but simply tracking which other tracers it comes into contact with and storing that data in case a facility needs to determine who has come into contact with a sick worker.
Let’s look at the social-distancing aspect more closely. These types of tracers are discreet and come in several wearable form factors, such as a clip, pendant or wristband. The devices can sense when they’re in close proximity with another device or user and alert individuals either through visual LEDs, a beeper or vibration. The technology is unobtrusive and is akin to a health and safety equivalent of a red/yellow/green light system that indicates the status of a production line.
These wearable tracers also play a critical role in augmenting what employees are able to jointly do when contact tracing is necessary. Traditional contact tracing would require someone to retrace their steps throughout the course of 2 to 3 prior days, which involves remembering everyone with whom they came into contact. That is very hard to do quickly and accurately, but the tracers remove the chance for human error and provide critical data to ensure successful contact tracking.
In order to build a timeline for contact tracing, it’s necessary to log all instances of contact, so if someone is infected, the people they’ve been exposed to can be notified and checked for illness. This means contact data needs to be logged on the wearable tracer, and then uploaded to the cloud for analysis to help establish linkage and identify people who have come into contact with an infected person. The challenges of ensuring social distancing and conducting rapid, accurate contact tracing are clearly distinctive in different settings, but these kinds of wearable tracers can be highly effective in various types of operations.
Let’s look at a smaller factory as an example. These facilities can be very difficult places to ensure social distancing and conduct contact tracing due to the tighter space and the need to coordinate work from one part of the process to the next—and the steps before that, as well as everyone else ahead of them in the process. Shift changes represent another challenge for factories, as some employees leave the facility while others are arriving. It can be practically impossible to fully avoid exposure to others, and if the process involves person-to-person interactions by default, the potential for human error and closer-than-intended exposure is high.
To implement this technology in an industrial setting, anyone with access to the floor would be issued the wearable tracers that communicate with a series of wireless gateways as employees move around the facility. The gateways would be installed around strategic locations, such as common areas where everyone passes during the day (for example, parking areas, break rooms and loading docks). As users come within range, the gateways collect the tracer data and upload it to the cloud for analysis. Using cellular connectivity makes setting up the required infrastructure easier, as it eliminates the need for additional cables or dealing with company Wi-Fi networks.
One of the keys to this kind of technology is that it is frictionless, which means no significant change of behavior is required for the technology to do its job. There’s no required action on the part of the wearer, other than to wear the tracer, and there’s no need to manually upload data, interact with the device or do anything else. All of that is automated. The tracers work continuously, powered by a long-lasting battery, and are not vulnerable to user error, such as forgetting to log data or failing to charge the battery.
Maintaining social distancing and performing quick, accurate contact tracing will be key to safely running factories worldwide until all who need the vaccine can receive it.
Bill Steinike is the VP of strategic business development at Laird Connectivity, which provides a full range of wireless modules, IoT devices and antenna solutions that simplify the process of using wireless technology. Bill has more than 25 years of experience in developing and growing new business in the wireless and IoT industry, particularly related to Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, 802.15.4, LoRa, cellular and antenna technologies. He previously served as president of LS Research until it was acquired by Laird in 2015 to form Laird Connectivity.