It is now clear that COVID-19 will have a lasting impact on enterprise operations and the spaces where we work for years to come. While many companies are still allowing employees to work from home, others are returning to the workplace for the first time in months despite a Qualtrics study that found that 2 out of 3 workers are expressing discomfort with a return to the workplace. Yet, companies understand that a completely remote workforce is unlikely, given the intangible benefits of social connection, collaboration, and innovation that in-person working provides.

Because COVID-19 may become a cyclical problem, like influenza, many companies are preparing targeted initiatives around detection and better management of the transmission of illness. A Wellable survey of U.S. enterprises found that poor health costs employers $530 billion annually, and this metric was prior to COVID-19. An unintended benefit of COVID-19 includes targeted, enterprise-driven initiatives to improve the overall health of the workforce and, as a result, improve overall productivity.

One thing is clear: getting “back to work” will require a hyper-focus on employee safety, optimized supply chain and logistics monitoring, and facilitating a safe environment for employees and customers alike. Revenue and reputation are both at stake.

Blueforce edge IoT technology is being used to augment a wide array of business processes for outbreak prevention, enabling intelligent workflows for human traffic management, and creating a safer workforce environment specific to COVID-19 mitigation. Blueforce technology leverage includes:

• People and car counting: A repurposing of our national security sensors and cognitive services to anonymously count people, but also vehicular traffic, as a means to understand the timing, volume, and directional flow of employees, customers, and partners coming to the retail, arena, and/or enterprise location. This capability yields the real-time data to enable predictive flow control and just-in-time redirection of human traffic to minimize human clustering.
• Pre-entry wellness checks: A repurposing of national security thermal and hyper-spectral imagers to detect elevated body temperature which can fuse with, and correlate data, with other facility sensors. Lobbies and other entry chokepoints play a critical role in screening for health, facilitating authorized entry, and enabling social distancing. For visitors to an enterprise, like suppliers, partners, and customers, who are outside of the closed-loop enterprise system, standoff screening becomes even more important.
• Autonomous signaling of smart signage: Because the Blueforce edge IoT platform fuses and cues a wide range of sensors and can also include real-time AI-enabled stream analytics, autonomous recognitional support is enabled. This allows various COVID specific workflows and business rules to be enacted and communicated via next generation Smart Displays like those from Samsung, allowing hyper-local switching of signage content when sensors detect the potential for human clustering.

While business process and “new ways of doing things” will be essential, IoT sensors and AI-enabled workflows will accelerate the recognition and real-time interventions needed to keep the business environment safe for employees and customers alike. For more information, download our free eBook, or send an email to info@blueforcedev.com.