With COVID not far behind us, the biggest challenge in the coming months will be to maintain safety distances in the workplace and more particularly in factories, where social distancing can be more difficult to maintain.
Without mentioning the meetings between colleagues in the locker room or the cafeteria, factories, logistics centers, and warehouses are important places of human interaction.
As we see around the world, many companies witness a high rate of contamination among their employees. If a case of COVID is detected in factories, for example, the establishment must be closed for several days and the contact cases isolated, which can impact many employees. The current situation being already complicated, the closure of a plant can represent considerable costs for companies and endanger their economic equilibrium.
Zozio, a young company specialized in geolocation services, has developed an innovative solution to protect employees in the workplace. This solution, called KYD (Keep Your Distance), aims to prevent contamination clusters and respect the rules of distancing in the workplace.
The badge, worn by the user, is geolocated and issues a real-time alert if an employee does not respect the safety distance of 2 meters. This allows the collaborators to manage their travel with full responsibility.
The geolocation of the badge makes it possible to analyze contacts but also flows in order to optimize the maximum number of people per zone and effectively ensure the application of health measures. In addition, a notification is sent on the badge of an employee who came into close contact with a contaminated person.
The badge also makes it possible to issue a one-off alert when the distance is not respected, with a time stamp, and identification by badge number guaranteeing the anonymity of its holder.
This device made-in-France guarantees anonymity since it is only categorized by a unique number. In the event of contact with a person who has tested positive for COVID, a notification will be sent to its owner. Thanks to the UWB (Ultra Wide Band) technology, KYD can deliver up to 10 cm precision, which makes it particularly reliable. In addition to its unparalleled autonomy (one recharge per week), KYD identifies risk areas (where human flows and interactions are greater for example) and guarantees the optimization of disinfection operations.
The KYD solution is the result of a partnership between WizziLab and Zozio, designed and developed in France with the industrial support of the [French] electronics manufacturer, Asteelflash.
WizziLab, a specialist in the Internet of Things since 2011, was in charge of the development and design phase of the product. WizziLab expertise in low-power DASH7 protocol and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technologies helped to achieve the objectives of reactivity, autonomy, and precision of the product (to the decimeter range).
Asteelflash, one of the leaders in electronics manufacturing services and a French group, will mass-produce the badges in its French factories. Asteelflash overcame the challenges of this project by offering efficient sourcing solutions and went even further with the development of plastic molds in the shortest time (2 weeks instead of 6 to 8 weeks usually).
In less than two and a half months, Zozio, WizziLab, and Asteelflash were able to set up this large-scale project with the common objective to offer a reliable and competitive local product to large industrials but also SMEs and very small businesses.
In the long term, Zozio has set the mission of simplifying the work of operators and increasing industrial productivity by offering smart geolocation solutions tailored to the needs of its customers. These solutions, easy to implement, allow affordable investment costs and an optimized management of assets and flows, all thanks to the Artificial Intelligence (AI).
Zozio's solutions are accessible to all industrial sectors, such as automotive, aerospace, cosmetics, chemicals, pharmaceuticals, transport, logistics centers, and many more.
Beyond COVID, KYD badges are scalable and can be reprogrammed to meet new business needs. For example, the implementation of Lean strategy, predictive logistics, detection of technical inconsistencies, inventory management, etc.
Thus, managing the health crisis is not incompatible with strategies for optimizing flows on industrial sites and logistics centers. 😎