Personal Safety Zone

Personal Safety Zone app gives you a warning, if you are too close to your colleagues
It works with direct device-to-device distance measurement. Requires no additional hardware.
It has been calibrated for in-pocket usage
It can measure distance with 20 cm accuracy, and send a realtime warning with visual, noise and vibration to alert on too close proximity.
Through calibration, we have been able to make the solution work across different phone models from Android 5 onwards.
Based on GPS coordinates, we can visualize where the encounter happened. Managers can use the data to improve the use of the premises.

Problem our product solves

Restrictions are being relieved; society is opening up more, and people will be soon returning to workplaces. However, the virus is not gone, and we still need to minimize contagion by keeping safe distances. According to experts, this is one of the most efficient ways of protecting from the virus spread, and a recommendation that will stay in effect for a long time to come. But in our everyday lives at work, safe distances are easily forgotten.

The solution

Personal Safety Zone is a simple solution that reminds individuals about keeping the safety zone. It acts as a subtle reminder and personal safety tool. It is app-based solution for measuring the distance between employees at a workplace environment. The solution is aimed for use at closed work environments, where everyone present on-site can be recommended to install the application, such as corporate offices, factories or construction sites.

Does not require any additional hardware.
Measures the distance of employees at a workplace or other environment based on direct Bluetooth connection between the devices.
Site manager can determine the safe distance for their location, according to the current local recommendations.
Gives a real-time warning to through the app, if another device is detected too close. Warning can take place as a visual alert, sound and vibration.
This encounter can also be recorded and informed to the site managers, who can use the information for further planning the workplace safer to avoid such encounters in the future.
Through a web portal, the site manager can see the areas where most encounters have happened. Encounter location stored via GPS coordinates.
As no additional hardware is required, our solution can be rolled out to different workplaces in days.
Can be distributed via an application or SDK.
A longer video of the application in use: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXn4u9tXE6E
Analytics visualizations in the web portal: https://youtu.be/OXY3TC0g87Q

How we built it

Our international team of 6 is an expert on Bluetooth technology, and we have been working on various approaches on mobile positioning the last 6 years in the company Proximi.io. The personal Safety Zone is a new concept that takes everything we are used to doing with Bluetooth connectivity to a completely new direction. The solution is built as a native Android (Java) and iOS (Swift) SDK, utilizing our custom Bluetooth Low Energy transmission protocol and various layers of filtering (e.g. Kalman filters). The project is working on a beta level, and can be rolled out to any workplace after a calibration.

What we did during the weekend

Worked on the business concept
Collected feedback on functionality/ features required
Discussed with potential industries that the solution could work for
Collected feedback on potential users' concerns and improvement suggestions
Product testing
Created promotional material

The solution’s impact to the crisis

According to experts, keeping safe distances is one of the most efficient ways of protecting from the virus spread, and a recommendation that will stay in effect for a long time to come. The solution acts as a personal reminder that helps to keep the safety zones in mind during a busy workday. It also assists site managers in designing the venues to be more safe. We bring on board a less invasive, more personal approach to utilizing mobile proximity to the government-run approaches or the solution being developed by Google/Apple. Instead of tracing virus chains on the societal level, we focus on preventing them in the first place by gentle reminders. Our approach is bottom-up, giving individuals and organizations the capability of being in charge of their location data. We take data security and privacy very seriously. If preferred by the individual and organization, we can do the data collection fully anonymously, without storing the GPS coordinates of the encounter.

The necessities in order to continue the project

We are aiming to roll out the solution to first users within the next 2 weeks. We need either paying customers or other monetary support to cover the costs of finishing the development and testing of the solution and for test devices. After the product is ready, we will need test users and help in spreading the word about the solution to the organizations seeking solutions like this, such as corporate offices, factories and universities.

The value of your solution after the crisis

After the current crisis, the solution will be valuable with any potential future infection spreads on local or global scale. Additionally, some sectors would benefit from proximity notifications also under normal circumstances. For example in logistics and construction industries, there are large number of people in small area, moving with heavy machinery. Accidents, where one does not notice a colleague when moving around can cause severe injuries or fatalities. A notification like ours could help save lives. On the polar opposite, in the event industry, our solution could automatically keep track of whom you have met during the day, and work as a digital business card.

Interested in hearing more?

We are looking for first customers to start rolling out this project to. For more information, contact us via our website: https://proximi.io/. In the long run, we are planning to add more functionality to the solution, such as ability to do real-time routing to avoid the areas with most encounters.