How These Manufacturing Companies Are Pivoting to Help in the Fight Against COVID-19 – By Patrick Lucas Austin (TIME) / Aug 20 2020
With the COVID-19 pandemic disrupting businesses around the world, the desire to keep operations up and running is butting up against companies’ need to keep their employees safe on the job. That’s leading many firms to pursue more novel ways of ensuring employees don’t get sick, maintaining social distancing, and outfitting employees with personal protective equipment (PPE).
Among the firms working on social distancing solutions: Pathfindr, a U.K.-based asset tracking company. Pathfindr makes sensors designed to track components during the manufacturing process using technology like Bluetooth and GPS, and started with a product designed to keep track of housecats for a BBC documentary. “Cats like to sleep a lot…that was the valuable insight from that exercise, but it was good for us,” says Pathfindr Managing Director Matt Isherwood. Good indeed, because that show caught the attention of Rolls-Royce Aerospace, which was looking for a way to keep tabs on jet engine parts in its various facilities. The company, spun out into its own business unit in 2016, has picked up other clients along the way, including Singapore Airlines and PepsiCo.
As COVID-19 spread around the world, Pathfindr’s engineers began experimenting with ways to help people maintain proper social distance, creating prototypes like motion-sensitive jewelry that would zap a wearer if they reached for their face. The end result: a gadget called the “Safe Distancing Assistant,” which warns users when someone else also using one of the devices comes within their six-foot bubble. The device, which works via Bluetooth and ultra-wideband radio, has received positive feedback from clients like Bentley Motors and GlaxoSmithKline, both of which are looking to keep employees separated in enclosed spaces, Pathfindr execs say. “From a commercial perspective, they need to get up and operating again,” says Isherwood. “There are real financial as well as human factors behind it.”
Continue to article: https://time.com/5880829/covid-19-manufacturing/
