Writing to you from ground zero here in Seattle, we have been monitoring and working with essential businesses throughout this pandemic. Just yesterday, a Tyson Foods plant in Eastern Washington, reported that 100 of their workers tested positive for COVID-19. There is no doubt we have to rethink how we are going to get back to work in a safe manner and rethink how we conduct business.
As a technology company, one of our core competencies is active transponder technology. Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, our company had been developing a location tracking software application that leverages active transponders by Siemens Industry to locate and track things. The things that can be monitored in real-time include products, equipment, and people. In reality, you can track anything that a transponder device can be attached to.
Our Latest Thinking
What if you could…
- Contact trace to monitor and manage social distancing
- Monitor a heat map of high-traffic areas in your facility so that you could focus sanitation efforts in the right places and manage how people move around the workplace.
- Be able to notify individuals who came into contact with an infected person in your facility.
Our development team has created a software extension for existing Siemens Real-Time Locating Systems (RTLS) to enhance location tracking. We were planning to launch our software extension in June or July however, given the current circumstances, we thought it would be apropos to start making people aware of the product as it could mitigate a tremendous amount of risk.
Built on Real-Time Locating Systems by Siemens
RTLS is a solution that allows anything with an active transponder to be monitored and tracked. These active devices can be attached to things like equipment, products, tools, and or people. The active signals coming from the “things” can then be viewed in real-time and decisions can be made to increase safety, and improve operations.
How does it work?
Customers would need to determine what things would need to be monitored along with their associated areas. Transponders would then be attached to the things and a signal would be transmitted for consumption. This signal would be ingested at an anchor or gateway location and available for viewing both on-premise or on a wide area network (Cloud). RTLS information is accessible via smart devices, laptops, PC workstations, etc. The graphic below is a visual representation of the RTLS system setup.
Location Insight
Once your things are connected, they can now be tracked in real-time and informed decisions can be made. For example, the following insight would enable the user to understand the traffic patterns of both individuals or groups of people at a particular area or location. Based on the figure below, one could deduce that focused sanitation efforts should be applied in higher traffic areas or general re-routing could be taken into consideration.
Here is a dashboard view of things in an area being monitored in real-time.
Additional Features
- Real-Time tracking
- Historical records applied to areas and general movement
- Contact tracing
- Association – When things come into contact or relation with other things