After months of work from home (WFH) across many parts of Asia, some cities are beginning to see some semblance of return to normal – sort of anyway.
While some companies are declaring that staff can continue to work from home even when governments cease lockdown measures, many others, like Apple, expect employees to return to work.
But as employees to the workplace, companies, voluntarily or not, are introducing new workplace measures to practice social distancing in the workplace. For example, the guidelines issues by Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry (MIT) call for the provision of “necessary safe management measures to minimize crowding within premises and ensure high sanitation and hygiene standards.”
Sounds simple enough. The simplest is to just issue guidelines like maintaining social distancing everywhere in the workplace including toilets, pantry area and meeting rooms. Other measures like staggered working hours and break times may present more challenge to monitor and record.
Mist Systems is making available solutions that include proximity tracing, journey mapping and hot zone alerting as part of strategic contact tracing and social distancing initiatives.
Sudheer Matta, VP of Products said the Mist architecture combines Wi-Fi with virtual BLE technology. For those who willing to pay extra there is a Premium Analytics service that provides insight into network performance and user experiences at all endpoints enabling proactive capacity planning of heterogenous networks.
Mist claims to have an ecosystem of technology partners to deliver solutions in support of enterprise contact tracing, social distancing and other indoor location use cases. This includes wearable BLE badges, real-time notification systems and applications that leverage the Mist open-SDK for high-accuracy indoor location.
Basically, Mist can use phones and badges to track employees – a condition that some analysts and tech vendors has the potential to privacy rights.
Features of Mist System include:
- Proximity tracing: If an individual identifies as COVID-19 positive (or is experiencing symptoms), enterprises can quickly identify and notify other employees, guests or customers that may have been in close proximity to that individual while onsite.
- Journey mapping: Customers can view historical traffic patterns and dwell times for employees who have reported testing positive for COVID-19 – from the moment they were onsite to departure. Journey mapping can identify high-traffic hot zones so customers can take safety measures such as reconfiguring workspaces and deploying additional cleaning efforts.
- Hot zone alerting: By looking at the quantity of devices and locations in specific areas, enterprises can disperse or divert traffic away from congested areas with real-time, location-based alerting. They can also view trends over time to identify certain areas for proactive measures.
Contact tracing is not without its detractors. Already in the US and the UK privacy groups are raising concern over individual’s right to privacy in the wake of the wider application of contact tracing with the continued spread of COVID-19.
