From touchless navigation to a contact tracing solution that does not depend on positioning hardware, here's how Mappedin helps keep your venue safe. 

On account of the COVID-19 virus, people all around the world are being asked to stay home and stay indoors. While many have the luxury of working from home, the reality is that there are brave people everywhere that continue to work on the frontlines to protect the health and safety of their communities. For that group, the ones where social distancing is not an option, businesses must do their part to ensure these frontline workers are protected. 

Many companies have adopted remote working policies and most non-essential businesses have closed their doors temporarily, but healthcare facilities, grocery stores, and warehouses, among others, are busier than ever. For those that continue to operate, up-to-date indoor mapping technology can provide a safer way of doing business. Now more than ever, it is important to have a contactless way of navigating the indoors. 

What is contact tracing?

Contact tracing is the process of monitoring those who have been in close contact with an infected person, as explained by the World Health Organization. The three key components are contact identification, contact listing, and follow-up. 

Institutions that continue to operate, particularly hospitals and healthcare facilities, need to keep track of frontline workers who are exposed to patients with COVID-19. By tracking key personnel and others they have come into contact with, businesses can better understand who is at risk of being infected. There are existing solutions on the market that offer contact tracing, but they have been built primarily for the outdoors and do not offer scalable solutions for the indoors.

Mappedin has developed a contact tracing application to monitor and track frontline workers inside of buildings, drawing on infrastructure-free positioning technology to understand who is at risk when, in the unfortunate case, a worker becomes COVID+.

How can digital maps help?

Mappedin’s core offering is a digital map foundation to create, maintain, and deploy indoor maps for countless use cases. Our pre-built applications offer interactive 3D maps and easy-to-use wayfinding, while our Mapping SDKs provide indoor mapping components to build custom experiences that rely on accurate location data.

Venues with Mappedin’s contact tracing solution can tag specific and COVID+ personnel and receive reports of other employees that are at-risk based on their proximity to them. This real-time data can help keep others safe. Mappedin's solution, compared to others, is unique in the fact that it does not rely on indoor positioning hardware, such as beacons, to be installed at a venue. Instead, we work with Apple Maps and leverage their free indoor positioning to understand employee movements. 

Designed to keep workers and visitors safe, Mappedin’s contact tracing system has the following main components: 

• Map Manager to build, edit, maintain, and deploy indoor maps and location data

• Infrastructure-free indoor positioning to track employees within specified parameters

• Front-end web application to showcase at-risk personnel and those that came into close proximity of them within the venue

Along with contact tracing technology, Mappedin provides accurate and up-to-date digital maps so that businesses can offer an experience that is safe and efficient. For example, grocery stores can navigate shoppers quickly through their stores and warehouses can help employees find products faster. With a Map Manager tool that showcases edits in real time, companies can set preferred routing or blocked access points. To ensure that visitors to these facilities can navigate safely and independently, Mappedin has developed a quick access QR code for touchless directions. Users can simply scan a QR code to have the digital map experience open on their phones. With this technology, they can still find their way without a risk of contact. 

How else can indoor maps be used to help your business? Are there other unique applications of contact tracing that can help keep your facilities safe? Subscribe to our newsletter to keep the dialogue going.