Represents the solution to maintain social distances between students, teachers and staff within universities, during the Coronavirus Emergency

Have you been to Universities during the Coronovirus lockdown? Have you been to Research institutes and research laboratories? Our class-rooms are empty. Our laboratories are closed. We go there only to check nitrogen levels, to switch on delicate instrumentations that cannot be stopped, or to keep our laboratory animals. We have frozen everything, we stopped all the research activities. But…… we want to come back to our normal life. We want to come back to our departments, we want to work in our laboratories and go on with our research projects. Not all jobs can be done remotely. Biologists, Biotechnologists, Molecular Biologists, Medical students, Chemists, and all scientists cannot work remotely. We can study literature, that’s what we are doing. We are providing on-line lectures to students, but this is not the same. As you now the world has understood very well is that Scientific Research is very important for the human being. We want to come back, but all professors and university staff fear the reopening of universities. We can, anyway, maintaining the social distances. Sometimes we will work remotely, sometimes we need to go to the laboratory. Unfortunately, remote learning does not have the same value as that given in classrooms and for which students pay and the state has spent a lot of time and money. Some activities cannot be carried out remotely, such as profit exams, traineeships and laboratory activities. These are carried out by students, PhD students and post-docs within the departments of the universities. Little by little we must go back to the normal life, and if we can't go back immediately (June-July) surely in the near future we will have to find a solution to keep social distances and avoid the crowds outside the single departments.

Apart from the list of students generated by the university web portals, there are currently no systems or digital solutions capable of guaranteeing social distancing. The solution is Dynamic, the first webapp able to manage the space in a laboratory and in all University locations. With this software Universities can manage easily staff and student flow inside university Departments, Libraries, Museums and others. The user just needs a mobile phone or a tablet to book in advance his space in the laboratory or in the class-room or the museum or in the other common spaces shared by the university staff or students. After booking, he will have his workstation in a lab or place in a classroom assigned. When it is his turn, he needs to frame the QR code of the room with his device and Dynamic will tell him if he can enter or not. On the other side, the manager of the room can create a virtual class-room or lab and will decide how many people can work together safely considering distances required during Covid-19 Emergency. Moreover, he will decide which other individual protection devices the user will have to wear before entering the room. When the manager creates a virtual room Dynamic will create two QR codes (one for entrance and one for exit) to print on a sheet of paper and stick on the entrance and the exit doors. Booking will be organized into schedules, with a time interval between one user and the other decided by the manager of the room. In this manner the number of users is limited to the one established by the room manager, and the person who need to use that room knows when it is his turn without waste of time. So Dynamic will organize the work of the user and the manager, making simple the work for both of them. This system will create virtual classrooms and laboratories (within which a certain number of people will be inserted by the app, using emergency criteria) and a dynamic virtual row for people who have to enter a classroom. In the case of research laboratories, and in particular in the case of laboratories dedicated to particular techniques such as cell culture rooms, the laboratory manager will create a virtual laboratory in which he will decide how many operators can enter and when, leaving outside who wait to enter to carry out his experiments. In the first version of the app we have designed a pre-ordered distribution of students with pre-established intervals, but we will add the possibility to organize the queue dynamically during the day of interest referring to the geo-localization of the student. The last feature will avoid crowds outside university departments and in the streets, and will reduce the waiting time. Ideally, if a user takes less time to perform his task, the room will be available again immediately without waiting for the whole set period of time. In order to protect user’s data and privacy, the app automatically will ask for consent of user to collect data, will notify user on data to be used and inform the which data will be hold which are absolutely necessary. The user will be enabled to withdraw consent and request for his data to be deleted. If data will be used by Third Parties, the user will have the possibility to ask to delete his data from servers. Clear procedures will be established for data breaches, to inform users and national supervisory authorities, to start documenting all the data collected and log data collection activities.

Dynamic offers a simple and very cheap way to create a virtual and dynamic row and will manage the space inside the rooms to better organize profit exams, frequency of traineeships and research laboratories at university locations. A dynamic management of the queue avoids an enormous waste of time for teachers, students and operators and crowd forming outside the Department or the classrooms. During emergency, Dynamic can be also optimized to manage spaces inside public offices, congresses, conference sites, cinemas, industries, private laboratories, small enterprises and schools. This app will be useful not only during Covid-19 Emergency, but will be very useful to manage the university life also in the future.

Mainly we learned how to be helpful in Coronovirus Emergency and how to join forces to face this world emergency. We come from very different experiences. Some of us working in Universities learned how to create an app, how to concretize their management ideas. Others coming from the computer world learned which are the need of the university world and scientists. Other coming from Law how to be helpful in the previous two fields. All together we learned how it is very important for people coming from different experiences to overcome even the most difficult of the health emergencies from the post-war period to today.