There are myriad application opportunities as businesses around the world reopen with new requirements to reduce the spread of the virus.
I had the opportunity to talk to David Sprinzen, Director of Product Marketing at VANTIQ about their Back-To-Work Accelerator.
There is a paradigm shift in business driven by IoT, edge computing, and artificial intelligence. VANTIQ began five years ago to provide rapid application development to enterprises that need to ingest, process, and analyze real-time unstructured data to obtain business insights. Companies today are working to improve situational awareness by analyzing, contextualizing, responding, and alerting the right people to model responses in real-time.
The new age of real-time enterprise and smarter business involves:
Enabling AI with IoT and edge computing to detect situations of interest
Business intelligence providing situational awareness in real-time
Offering products as everything-as-a-service
Recreating the physical world in the virtual world with digital twins
Retooling databases to accept streaming, unstructured data
To meet new demands and expectations, companies are rushing to create real-time, event-driven apps where data is gathered from sensors, business systems, IoT devices, and mobile devices. This data creates event streams like system, machine, and people status, vehicle and people location, external conditions, notifications, and alerts. Which, in turn, result in real-time actions like relocating machines, assigning technicians, redirecting vehicles, stopping assembly lines, reordering parts, assisting maintenance, controlling systems, and closing issues.
The back-to-work accelerator leverages pre-built components, digital twins, and agile integration with assets and technologies to build real-time apps to safeguard workplaces against the spread of Covid-19 with:
Contact tracking that identifies people and correlates locations, feeds the contact tracking algorithm and uses real-time data from cameras and sensors.
Physical distancing detection of individuals within spaces, calculating the distance between people, counting people in spaces, and providing real-time operational alerts.
Access management enforces isolation zones, provides real-time visualizations, counts people, identifies security breaches, and provides operational alerts.
Asset management for maintenance and field service provides real-time status and alerts, usage and availability, and location tracking.
Symptom detection is used to determine elevated body temperature, sneezing, coughing, and identifying and tracking people with symptoms so security can be alerted.
Safety compliance ensures companies are adhering to regulations, enforcing the use of masks, tracking hygiene, and implementing smart sanitation for a cleaner workplace.
Event data streams enable companies to perform real-time actions around everything a company needs to do to offer a safe in-office work environment to employees returning to work, and customers return to retail locations, as restrictions around Covid-19 are lifted. Connected assets like access control, cameras, equipment, sensors, and wearables are able to connect with the core components of virus prevention best practices.
VANTIQ is seeing early adoption of their accelerator by essential businesses like life sciences companies making personal protective equipment and many others working to create a more nimble distributed work environment.
Use Cases
Bits in Glass, a software consulting firm, has already used accelerator components to create a virtual queuing application to help retail businesses ensure the physical distancing of customers by removing the need for in-person lines.
Amorph Systems has built an infection detection and containment system for airports that integrates thermal cameras with flight and passenger information, and real-time communication to help airport operations identify potential threats of contamination.