For some, contact tracing is a public responsibility that must be overseen by governments. For others, it’s a private responsibility that must be managed by the private sector. It’s been over 4 months since the COVID-19 pandemic and many countries have deployed mandatory or voluntary contact tracing apps. As of today, no countries or governments have convinced the vast majority of its citizen to use those apps. Traditionally contact tracing is done manually by a contact tracer contacting and interviewing citizens by phone. In today’s technological era, this is a primitive and an inefficient way yet it’s the most accepted method of contact tracing.
Contact tracing is a race against the clock where the risks are increased tenfold when we are faced with a super spreader in a large enclosed venue, where we have multitude of proximity contacts.
Contact tracing has 3 types of contacts
The question is how fast can you identify and reach the potentially exposed person from a confirmed COVID-19 case or their exposure to a contaminated surface? Every company has adopted their own consumer and employee policies in regard to COVID-19. Some ask their employees to work from home, to social distance within the office, take their temperature, make their employees sign health statuses daily or use their loyalty programs and video surveillance feeds to trace exposed customers. In their own way, the private sector is getting involved in the well-being of their customers and employees.
Contact tracing should be part of HR health management. HR must have automated tools to oversee contact tracing. It will allow them to protect the most valuable assets of their company their employees, suppliers and customers. The digital contact tracing tools for HR must combine GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth coordinates in order to provide the most accurate information on their employees’ or customers’ journey within their premises. Using just one of the 3 types of coordinates is insufficient and can lead to inaccuracy and mistakes. If we use just the GPS coordinates, those data points are not precise enough to differentiate that 2 individuals are in the same buildings but on different floors. Also, some environments have poor GPS reception. If use Bluetooth data points only, although it’s very powerful to identify peer to peer close contacts between devices, it is not so accurate to determine the exact location except if you install beacons all over the place. On the other hand, most companies have private and public Wi-Fi networks with exact mapping and SSID strength and range allowing to trace an exact path of movements per device. Collecting and capturing all of those 3 data points provides the most accurate way to identify and trace contacts within a precise time frame. On top of this, we can add video feeds to get an even more clear picture.
The amazing thing with the use of those 4 data points is that most companies have already the hardware in place to collect the data and all HR needs is a smart app for its employees. With such tools you can provide your employees with a level of security especially for those who roam into different rooms, plants or sections of your building. You can identify who was in a conference room and for how long. You can prevent the closure of the entire company or sections in case of a confirmed COVID-19 case. Those tools are providing location-based contact tracing. HR can not only track or ask employees to use the apps only when they are entering work, but large corporation could even go further and create an ecosystem between them and their business partners like a large corporation with a large chain of gyms, or pharmacies.
Visit our website for more information https://only1apps.com
For more information on the new platform in response to COVID-19 to oversee capacity and location tracing contact: nathalie.azoulay@only1.one linkedin.com/in/nathalieazoulay