Siemens Delivers Digital Contact Tracing Application for Safer Workplaces
Siemens announced the release of Enlightened Safe, an application that facilitates tracking employees who may have been in contact with an infected individual at their workplace.
We already know that many manufacturing facilities are interested in the condition monitoring of their equipment. Still, with a global pandemic, there is a strong interest in monitoring employees for their health and safety.
Emerson recently updated Plantweb to support contact tracing and social density management, and now Siemens is offering their digital contract tracing app, Enlightened Safe.
How Enlightened Safe Works
Enlightened Safe is a digital contact tracing application built upon the real-time location tracking capabilities of Enlightened. Its purpose is to make organizational contact tracing more accessible and more accurate without reducing employees' privacy by leveraging IoT (Internet of Things) technology to provide crucial data-driven insights.
Siemens' Enlightened Safe is a contact tracing app that aims to prioritize the privacy of employees. Image courtesy of Siemens.
Enlightened Safe utilizes real-time location tracking capabilities of Enlightened, a subsidiary of Siemens that focuses on cutting-edge building IoT systems. Each participating employee is assigned a BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) identification badge to wear while in the facility.
The Enlightened Safe app records employees' location and movement and their proximity to other employees in the building. Enlightened Safe aims to prioritize user privacy. The badge's ID is stored in Enlightened Safe, not the employee's identity.
COVID-19 Contact Tracing
When an employee tests positive for COVID-19, an authorized user enters the badge number. From that point, the app generates a report with a list of all anonymized badge IDs (not personal IDs) that came in contact with the infected person as a part of the organization's contact tracing process.
The list can filter according to date ranges, proximity, and contact duration, then exported in a useful format.
Benefits of Enlightened Safe for Contact Tracing
There are several ways that organizations and the manufacturing industry, in particular, can benefit from implementing the Enlightened Safe app. First, it allows an organization to potentially reduce the risk of virus transmission in its facilities, positively impacting both employee safety and productivity.
The Enlightened Safe app also provides valuable insight into physical distancing within the workplace while maintaining employees' privacy.
The app also enables more targeted sanitization efforts, reducing downtime for both employees and the equipment they interact with. This can be a crucial factor for organizations whose primary focus in manufacturing.
A graphic from Enlightened's website. Image courtesy of Enlightened.
Enlightened Safe is an excellent alternative to the inefficient and error-prone manual contact tracing processes currently in use, and it accomplishes this while still respecting the privacy of employees. It also supports peace of mind for employees that are returning to work during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Enlightened Safe app is a step towards enabling organizations to better respond to changing safety guidelines related to the Coronavirus outbreak and future health threats.
Enlightened Safe is intended to be a much more efficient approach to contact tracing, leveraging BLE technology, and IoT to help organizations maintain a safer, more productive environment.
For the manufacturing industry, its ability to provide more accurate insight sanitization can make a tremendous difference in equipment and assembly/production line downtime and the effective protection of employees.
