There has recently been a focus on the use of Connected Worker and related digital technologies including smart wearables, to help maintain distancing.
Wearables have been shown to support a back to work strategy and to nudge behaviours in order to maintain compliance. For less than the cost of a cup of coffee per employee per week for a typical wearable tag (in the first year) you would only need to gain 12 minutes per week of additional output through employees feeling safer and supported in order to gain a payback (based on a UK average salary of £30K/annum and a 40-hour week).
It is likely that the ROI would be significantly more. And, if the use of a contact tracing functionality, potentially infected workers could be isolated, and a productivity crisis averted.
The Orbi-Trace smart tag
Casella has developed an innovative, technology-forward solution to simplify social distancing in the workplace with the launch of the Orbi-Trace smart tag – a flexible social distancing solution that provides simple proximity alerts all the way up to full effective contact tracing.
The body-worn Orbi-Trace smart tag is simple to operate, with a stop/start input and single LED power alert. It gives the wearer fully configurable vibration and audible alerts whenever a two-metre safe distance is breached, and can operate indoors and out, with a battery life of up to seven days.
The sophisticated Ultra-wideband (UWB) connectivity is accurate in detecting distances down to 10cm accuracy – making it 20 x more accurate than Bluetooth. The connectivity will not cause interference with WIFI or other RF technologies.
When combined with the wall-mounted anchor unit and proprietary, free to use Infection Insights software, the Orbi-Trace can be used to generate connection graphs and risk and contact assessments, should an employee test positive for COVID-19.
Adding additional anchor units to the system expands this to full real-time contract tracking, giving users access to heat-maps of areas where social-distancing may be consistently challenging and a full contact tracing history, making enforcing controls much more straightforward. For those mediating employee privacy concerns, the Orbi-Trace system is also fully GDPR compliant.
