Singaporean company’s new tech to police social distancing will raise alarm when people are too close
- Sensors measure the distance between individuals and trigger alerts; the system can be also used with wristbands that track wearers’ location
- With governments increasingly adopting emerging tech to stem the spread of Covid-19, concerns have been raised over privacy, security and surveillance
A Singaporean company has developed advanced “eyes in the sky” technology to help police social distancing measures and prevent the spread of Covid-19. Like similar emerging technology, it raises privacy concerns.
While the authorities have hired social distancing ambassadors to ensure compliance with the laws, Smart IoT’s new invention – Smart Distancing Sensors on Premise (SDSP) – can also help. The invention consists of sensors in ceilings that scan crowds and measure the distance between individuals.
Smart IoT’s founder, Scott Fan, says SDSP can be installed at venues where people are typically grouped closely together. The system will trigger an alert if, say, people in a queue at a supermarket checkout or waiting for a table outside a restaurant are less than a metre apart. A laser light beamed from the sensor can guide the offender back to a safe distance.
People enforcing social distancing rules on the premises will also get a signal “to ensure the offender mends his ways”, Fan says.
“SDSP can be especially useful for places where employees are exposed to lots of people flow, such as airport customs queues and hotels” as well as shopping malls, food courts and banks, he says.
Fan says while the Covid-19 outbreak is waning in some countries such as China, social distancing is expected to remain “the new normal” around the world for the next two or three years until a vaccine is developed.
“When countries open up their borders or people open their shops, they are taking a risk,” he says, adding that his company’s applications can help control this risk.
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He says SDSP can be used together with smart wearables, including a wristband that monitors a person’s temperature and provides location tracking, for places that need extra protection such as homes for the elderly homes, hospitals and kindergartens.
“For a Covid-19 patient who goes beyond certain zones in a hospital, the wristband will trigger an alert,” he says.
Such wristbands could also be given to people with close ties to a confirmed Covid-19 patient.
“A suspect case … who goes out during the 14-day quarantine will trigger an alert to be sent to officials who are monitoring him. After the quarantine is over, an alert will also be triggered if he is less than a metre away from a person when he is outside the quarantine venue,” Fan says.
He cites other scenarios in which the wristband and SDSP can be used together, including schools when they reopen. If students and staff wear the wristbands and the SDSP is installed, daily temperature checks can be done and social distancing enforced.
Edwards has drafted a law to safeguard citizens’ rights after the British government revealed a National Health Service contact-tracing app to be launched in June. Her draft law proposes that any restraints the app suggests must be public, legitimate, necessary and proportionate to the public goal of defeating coronavirus, and data-sharing for any purpose beyond defeating the pandemic must require users’ consent.
It also proposes a new commissioner to safeguard against coronavirus should act as a watchdog.
“All the SDSP provides is a warning to the person who gets too near. This does not need to, or seem to, collect any persistent identifiers relating to any persons, so there is no privacy worry,” Edwards says.
The use of Smart IoT’s wristbands and SDSP in combination, though, could produce a permanent ongoing data record that might be misused, she says.
Anyone adopting the system should first ask if there is any value to having the record of proximity stored at all, she says. “If yes, is there any value for the record to be attached to identifiable persons?”
“But I do think people in every country may be worried about the long-term effects of large amounts of data about them being collected by the state and how that mass surveillance might be misused in the future … legal safeguards of some kind will be appropriate for every country.”