Indoor and Outdoor Tracking Solutions for COVID-19 Recovery

Indoor and Outdoor Tracking Solutions for COVID-19 Recovery

On April 16, 2020, the White House released its guidelines for states, employers, and individuals throughout each phase of recovery from the novel Coronavirus (COVID-19). As states begin meeting criteria to move into the next phase of recovery, employers are planning how to resume business operations.

Employers with large workforces and complex campuses are particularly interested in how to re-open facilities in compliance with federal state and local guidelines without jeopardizing employee health or wellness. With more people spread across more buildings, it can be onerous to find and eliminate areas of high contact and ensure those areas are sanitized to safeguard everyone’s health.

One guideline instrumental to the wellbeing of employees and the successful recovery of their community proves challenging: “develop and implement policies and procedures for workforce contact tracing following employee COVID+ test.”

Tracing can be as simple as asking the infected person who they came in contact with. In a small facility that question is simple, but in large buildings that can be a very difficult task.

Many solutions are capable of revealing movement of personnel outdoors, but fewer are capable of tracing movement indoors. Even fewer can account for the walls and floors within buildings to accurately represent the contact between two employees. To support employers planning and implementing procedures for employee tracing, Esri offers indoor and outdoor contact tracing solutions for your enterprise.

Protect your workforce

As an employer, the health and wellness of your employees and surrounding community is vital to the global recovery process and maintaining continuity of business. Until a vaccine is released, the workforce will consist of people who had the virus, people who had the virus but don’t know (because they were either asymptomatic or didn’t have severe enough symptoms to receive treatment), and people who have not yet had the virus. As a result, at least two thirds of the workforce will be reluctant to return to work unless proper procedures are put in place.

Using a passive contact tracing solution provides employees with the peace of mind that interactions are being monitored and that high contact areas are being routinely sanitized.

Employers can see where traffic is greatest and can automate alerts to cleaning crews after a certain threshold of people have passed through. Maintenance crews can be monitored against cleaning goals to ensure adequate staffing levels are in place to keep facilities clean.

With the ability to trace movement both indoors and outdoors, public health and corporate security missions can both be met. This solution has the ability to scale to support thousands of employees across multiple sites to safely advance through each phase of recovery, and to enhance safety far into the future.

Understand Proximity Tracing

ArcGIS Indoors allows employers to deploy tracing apps for both iOS and Android devices. This gives employers the ability to provide tools for any device in order to aggregate movements of their workforce in real-time and log contacts for historical analysis.

Performing spatial analysis on historical employee movement data not only enables employers to determine high traffic areas for sanitation, but also detect proximity between employees across space and time. If an infected employee gets past safeguards, having the ability to quickly analyze who they have come in contact with can help quell the spread.

Additional Resources

If you’re looking to learn more about indoor and outdoor tracking solutions for your enterprise, read about LEVEL 3 Facility Mapping in response to COVID-19 Pandemic, or LEVEL 3 Facility Mapping Solutions in our whitepaper. In addition, you can learn more about what Indoor Positioning Systems are  in our blog or watch our webinar. Finally you can learn about the types of indoor positioning infrastructure you can use to power your tracking and tracing solutions in our blog as well.