INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Bluetooth location beacon startup Estimote has adapted its technological expertise to develop a new product designed specifically for
curbing the spread of COVID-19
The company created a new range of wearable devices that co-founder Steve Cheney believes can enhance workplace safety for those who have to
be co-located at a physical workplace even while social distancing and physical isolation measures are in place.The devices, called simply
The intention is to give employers a way to hopefully maintain a pulse on any possible transmission among their workforces and provide them
with the ability to hopefully curtail any local spread before it becomes an outsized risk.The hardware includes passive GPS location
tracking, as well as proximity sensors powered by Bluetooth and ultra-wide-band radio connectivity, a rechargeable battery and built-in LTE
proximity and location-data history
This information is also stored in a health dashboard that provides detailed logs of possible contacts for centralized management
collaborate with WHO or other external health organizations to potentially leverage the information for tracing across enterprises and
populations, too.These are intended to come in a number of different form factors: the pebble-like version that exists today, which can be
The pebble-like design is already in production and 2,000 will be deployed now, with a plan to ramp production for as many as 10,000 more in
for nearly a decade and has worked with large global companies, including Apple and Amazon
Cheney tells me that he quickly recognized the need for the application of this technology to the unique problems presented by the pandemic,
but Estimote was already 18 months into developing it for other uses, including in hospitality industries for employee safety/panic button
technology-based solutions for contact tracing, including leveraging existing data gathered by smartphones and consumer applications to
for accurate workplace tracking in high-traffic environments
thoroughly than they would otherwise
By combining very dense contact tracing data from Bluetooth and UWB signals with information about infection status and symptoms, we may
and safety of the workers incurring those risks
More far-reaching measures might be needed, too, including general-public-connected, contact-tracing programs, and efforts like this one
should help inform the design and development of those.
