SmartApart - the social distancing app

To reduce the spread of Covid-19 it widely acknowledged that social distancing plays a critical role.

However, due to the criticality on the UK economy it is envisaged that most manufacturing companies will be encouraged to restart production well in advance of the UK beating Covid-19\. It is therefore essential that UK manufacturers are able to protect their employees and proactively encourage social distancing.

This project combines low cost off-the-shelf sensors worn in tabards around the necks of employees, with a scalable monitoring app, factory visualisation dashboard and an innovative gamification approach underpinned by AI, to provide real-time monitoring and Covid-19 HSE compliance scores by employee, department or company.

Tracking systems can be set up which rely only upon employees 'opting-in' to allowing their employers to track them using their personal or work-issued mobile phones through either a dedicated app, or simply by registering a device on the WiFi network. However, this technique offers limited positional accuracy and is best for sparsely populated workspaces. For privacy sake, this ability is limited to proximity to the work WiFi network.

Better accuracy can be achieved with Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) tracking. While this option does require capital expenditure, the costs are modest and would account for an improvement of a facility infrastructure. Fixed BLE 'stations' are deployed throughout a facility and interact with personal BLE devices on a continuous basis to determine location. Personal mobile devices can be used, as in the WiFi tracking method, but small, unobtrusive dedicated body-worn sensors can also be purchased for this purpose. The dedicated units have a number of advantages over the opt-in use of personal devices, including 100% compliance and the ability to sanitise devices effectively in sanitation stations overnight or between shifts to allow a 'pool' of communal sensors to be used.

The SmartApart app will continually monitor Covid-19 social distancing which will be communicated to workforce employees via digital shopfloor dashboards as well as via an app on their smart phones.

The critical success of this project is ensuring that the sensor technology is very low-cost, simple to implement and use, and has a gamification element to encourage individuals and organisations to focus on social distancing.