Safely Back to Work
BLE beacons are battery-powered transmitters that transmit a small amount of data over a short distance at periodic intervals of time . These beacons are attached at known locations around the facility . The smartphones carried by employees / staff act as BLE receivers combined with an app that constantly scans for nearby beacons . The detected beacons and associated radio signal levels are reported by the phone app to a backend cloud software . The cloud software then processes this information received from the phone apps to track the location ( and hence occupancy ) within the facility . Conversely , in some other implementations , the roles could be reversed where the BLE beacons ( or tags ) are issued to staff and the BLE readers are set up throughout the facility to track the location of the assets / people who are carrying the respective BLE tags 15 . The latter method does not depend on the staff having an appropriate phone and the BLE management app .
BLE technology is widely used for real-time location tracking as well as occupancy tracking within premises . It is very popular because of its low cost , very low power consumption leading to long battery life and easy installation and integration with existing infrastructure and systems .
COMPLIANCE WITH FACE MASKS
Video Analytics
In office spaces , cameras are usually installed in common areas , hallways , etc . for security surveillance reasons . These cameras capture faces of people in their field of view . This feed can be relayed to a software running on a computer . This software consisting of deep learning models trained to detect human faces and classify them as masked or unmasked can process the frames and keep a count of people without facial masks .
Fig . 8 : Automated monitoring of face mask compliance
This approach provides the flexibility of reusing the existing surveillance cameras for monitoring and measuring facial mask compliance , thus ensuring minimal infrastructural changes and costeffectiveness . However , the proper positioning of cameras 17 is crucial to ensure accurate results
- 28 - November 2020