Conquering COVID in Construction – a safe, managed return to site for construction workers

The IHS Markit purchasing managers' index for UK construction dropped to 39.3 last month from 52.6 the previous month, the lowest reading in more than 10 years. The UK construction sector employs 2.4m workers many of whom are self-employed and are unable to benefit from the Treasury's Furlough Scheme. The sector is a significant contributor to the UK's economic activity producing about 6 per cent of the country's total economic output.

The vision for the project is an easy to use health check and tracking app that will give the worker and their employer a simple red/green check of their ability to work. This would enable the industry to end the lockdown, re-engage the predominately self-employed workforce and restart economic activity in a significant sector.

The red/green advice from the app would be based on:

1\. Daily self-declared monitoring of general health and especially of any symptoms specific to COVID-19\. These declarations will be performed even when the user is self-isolating.

2\. A tracking feature that would record the user's location while at work and who else they have been in contact with (e.g. < 5 metres separation).

3\. Alerting when there are too many people too close together.

4\. Occupancy of any welfare units, so they can self-time their breaks to minimise unnecessary contacts.

5\. Alerting of the user when a co-worker who they have been in contact with is developing symptoms or who has tested positive for COVID-19\.

6\. Machine Learning-based algorithm to track the development of symptoms in the workforce.

The app would have a dashboard for the employer showing who is currently on-site, real-time hot spots showing where workers are congregating so they can be instructed to disperse, a list of staff who have reported symptoms or have tested positive, a list of staff who should be self-isolating because they may have come into contact with another infected member of staff, potential return dates for self-isolating staff plus a list of staff who have tested positive for antibodies and may be immune to re-infection.

Both China and South Korea have demonstrated the benefit of using tracking and contact tracing to reduce the spread of COVID-19\. Therefore, the proposed system can be part of an industry-led approach that will help the global construction sector to safely return to work.

The request for Extension Funding will; support trials with end users that will increase the impact and speed to market, fund the development of AI models to improve the accuracy of the locationing capability, fund the evaluation of additional wearable devices to monitor employee vital statistics (temperature, heart rate. etc), allow evaluation “System as a Service” business model and allow productization of the system by partnering with UK manufacturers.