How to Track and Manage Employee Public Health
At Proxfinity, we never stop thinking and learning about ways in which our social hardware and software can improve live interactions. We’ve written separately about how our SaaS backend can improve our new normal of videoconferencing and remote work. But because we can’t help ourselves and because our engineering team is frankly amazing, we figured why stop at the effects - why not show how social hardware can help everyone with the CAUSE of our new normal?
So we sat down and got serious about use cases for our tech that target the public health threats that are keeping all of us inside these days, i.e., how the COVID-19 virus spreads and infects populations. Yes, you read that right: our social hardware has medical applications. We even have a name for our smart badge in this context.
We call it the ResCUE.
While there’s a wealth of information and data we share with interested clients on this front, for now, we’ll confine ourselves to talking about our solutions for a key epidemiological problem that no one - not Google, not Tesla and not even Bill Gates - has addressed: tracking and managing person-to-person transmission of a disease.
First let’s state the obvious: seriously contagious diseases cause problems because they spread aggressively from person to person, especially before there are medicines or vaccines to address them, or even tests to figure out who has or had the disease. And we know vaccines and even tests take time to develop.
Where does Proxfinity come in? The “person-to-person” part. We’re experts at that, and our tech works better in that context than any other solution available today, including RFID. And it’s available right now.
There’s no other easy way to actually see when someone is close to someone else, or has been close to someone else, on the market. We highlighted Google’s excellent mapping capabilities, above - they are really cool, and you can see the impact the quarantine has had on the way people move, through space. But cellphone-GPS mapping cannot easily track how close people are to each other, or how long that proximity lasted - at least not without a massive amount of data analysis.
Why does this matter? If you can’t block a disease or treat it, you can at least be smarter about how people catch it. But getting smart on that front means knowing when people come into close contact with others; how close that contact was; and how often that contact happened. When the CDC tries to identify disease hot spots after the fact, they have to guess from people’s descriptions of where they went as to how many other folks they came into contact with, from working back to places and times that the sick person tries to remember.
That guessing is part of the reason we’re on lock down. If no one goes anywhere, generally speaking, the disease will slow down or stop. But that’s a blunt instrument that has practical limitations
What if you run an essential business - like a hospital, a grocery store, a factory, a mine, or even a government facility like a post office? How would you take care of your employees and keep the business running, knowing that a vaccine is 18 months away and tests are likely to be used only after the fact?
With ResCUEs on every employee while they work, any organization can instantly - and even anonymously - track how close everyone with a smart badge gets to everyone else with the tech.
This gives businesses and institutions an instant, intuitive map of person-to-person interaction, duration of interaction, and even physical distance of interaction.
No downloads, no legacy-tech issues, no apps - just slip the badge over your neck or put it in your pocket. And no need to reverse engineer who was near who and for how long from looking at a map or a blueprint of a space, or looking at time stamps.
Hospitals often have signal dampening in them - mines and factories cause problems too for items like phones, which in any case have battery-life issues too. The ResCUE doesn’t need wifi or cell signals - it works whenever it comes within 15 feet of another badge. It records the data locally, and when there IS a signal, uploads it. Its battery lasts for days.
RFID is often touted as the obvious technical answer to this same problem. Self-serving though it is, it’s also true that RFID has a lot of barriers that the ResCUE doesn’t. A few have already been mentioned - the need for signals, lack of local data storage capabilities, power issues. Others include the type of data itself, which is still geared towards spatial reference points, vs. person-to-person reference points - and the need to embed sensors in areas, not just put them on people.
Imagine one worker in one part of a warehouse winds up with COVID-19, and is hospitalized and tested. With cost-effective investment and minimal turnaround time and adjustment to spaces, work environment or IT, her company would be able to immediately see that in the 10 days prior to her falling ill exactly who else she had been near, for how long, and how near. This would allow them to warn those people quickly and with factual specificity to get tested if possible and quarantine immediately. It would also allow that company to have far more certainty about telling non-proximate employees their risk was low-to-minimal - at least from that patient.
For essential businesses, that’s why we think the ResCUE is an essential tool. It can’t prevent the spread of the disease, but it can instantly tell a company exactly how many people are really at risk, once someone GETS the disease. That means it makes every organization far smarter about how to manage limited tests, and smarter about how to leverage quarantine rules - and so smarter about public health.
And when it comes to public health, smarter almost always means safer.
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