How Contactless Technology Is Enabling Safer Workspaces Post COVID-19 As businesses are trying to come back to normal, the major concern is the fear of the spread of the virus at workplaces
By Rohin Parkar •
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Smart office concepts have been around for a while now, but these have never captured the imagination of the common man. These ideas were mainly treated as good-to-haves rather than must-haves. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed every human being's behavior and people are looking at smart solutions in a different angle, as the world is going through the worst health crisis in modern human history. Coronavirus has spread across the world like a wildfire taking down businesses, locking down countries and affecting the day-to-day lives of human beings.
As businesses are trying to come back to normal, the major concern is the fear of the spread of the virus at workplaces. Employers want to ensure that employees feel safe when they come in to work. Businesses are looking for technologies and solutions which can help them get to normal or rather adapt to the "new normal'. IoT is one of the key drivers of innovation in the post COVID-19 world. Every individual already has a powerful IoT device in their hands, the "smartphone', and this will create interesting new use cases. Touching things around us subconsciously may not be the norm going forward. "Contactless' is already a buzzword and businesses are looking for such solutions.
Here's how contactless technologies are making the workplace safer.
Contactless doors
Let's take the case of doors in an office or a workplace. In a normal office on an average, an employee touches a door handle 20-30 times a day. This could be one of the major sources of the spread of the virus. Coronavirus has been observed to survive on metal surfaces for days. Just a simple act of touching the door handle can potentially infect a person. There is a huge demand for contactless door opening solutions. Various solutions are being developed to solve these problems ranging from designs as simple as using foot-based door openers to automatic proximity-based door openers. In areas where access is restricted, there is an increased demand for contactless access control solutions which are based on smartphones. Every person carries a smartphone around all the time. Technologies have been developed where doors automatically unlock as you walk towards them, sensing and verifying your credentials stored in your smartphone in your pocket.
Contactless elevators
Employees at workplaces use elevators very frequently and this is another place where everybody touches the elevator buttons and are often packed together in a small space. There have been many cases where the COVID infection has been traced down to an elevator ride. Contactless elevator control and access will be a norm beyond 2020. It will just make no sense to touch the elevator controls. IoT will play a huge role in this transformation. Simple solutions like proximity-based elevator control to hi-tech solutions like smartphone-based elevator control have been developed and are being adopted in offices and corporate parks.
No touch attendance management
Other than employees, visitors at such workplaces also need to feel safe. Usually, visitor's check-in using a clipboard, or a register placed at the reception desk. More modern workplaces have tablet-based visitor check-in solutions. Now there is a demand for contactless visitor check-in solution where unscheduled visitors can create a visitor required without touching anything around them, preferably using their smartphone. A step further would be to allow visitors to access doors in a contactless manner through a smartphone App.
Instant access notification
Smartphone-based access control system eliminates the need to touch devices to get access to barriers.
Remote attendance
Remote log-in for work-from-home employees using our geo-attendance features on the app.
Remote access
Smartphone-based access control system eliminates the need to touch devices to get access to barriers thus making the workplace safer for the employees and visitors.
