As organizations bring their employees back to the workplace, many are looking to leverage location technology as a means to increase safety. Return-to-work solutions ranging from digital contact tracing and social distancing monitoring to sanitation alerts and occupancy analytics are being explored and embraced in varying degrees around the world. However, it’s imperative that any technology deployed works a double shift to also provide value in the post-pandemic times. The same location technology infrastructure used to address infection prevention and mitigation can be used to complement and enhance traditional security efforts.
Indoor intelligence technologies span a wide range of connective systems that make buildings smarter and provide valuable insights that can be used to address health, safety and security needs. It all starts by knowing the location of people and assets, and placing them on a detailed, dynamic, digital map of the facilities. The positioning can be accomplished leveraging existing Wi-Fi infrastructure or additional radio frequency (RF) sensors with software specifically designed to locate cell phones, smart watches and other RF-emitting devices including visitor badges and asset tags. From there, the opportunities are nearly limitless, as services and specific applications can then be layered on top.