ABSTRACT
Since the 11th of March 2020 when the World Health Organization declared the novel COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic, it registered officially over 5 million deaths worldwide. According to the course of the pandemic, governments encouraged best practices and then ruled out temporary restrictions on daily lives. In this scenario, non-essential labor-intensive sectors were forced to put on hold operations producing massive temporary layoffs. In gradually restoring the economic activities, governments passed several laws to passively mitigate the pathogen transmission in indoor working environments. However, several COVID19-related injuries were filled by manufacturing companies. According to the outlined conditions, this paper proposes an original and advanced hardware and software architecture to prevent the COVID19 transmission in indoor production environments. The aim is to increase the safety of whichever indoor productive workplace through a contact tracing approach. Indoor positioning systems due to their ability to accurately track the movement of tagged entities compose the hardware part. For this purpose, human operatives are equipped with adequate wearable sensors. Raw data acquired are properly mined through advanced algorithms to quantitatively assess the degree of safety of any working setting. Indeed, having as a reference the epidemiological evidence the software part defines an innovative risk index along two correlated dimensions. While the first defines the risk of any worker getting infected during the shift, the other one expresses the degree of COVID19-safety of the shop floor defined by the displacements of the anchors. Benefitting from these targeted and quantitative hints, plant supervisors may redesign the production settings to lower the chances of COVID19 infection. This innovative digital framework is validated in a real case study in the North of Italy which performs manual mechanical processing for the automotive industry.
ABSTRACT
The health emergency connected to the spread of the COVID-19 epidemic worldwide has caused a substantial suspension of the vast majority of face-to-face work activities that characterize manufacturing companies. The gradual reduction of new infections achieved thanks to the lockdown has brought attention to the topic of how "restarting" the activities into work environments, which must be carried out guaranteeing health security and avoiding the kick-off of a new phase of expansion of the disease due to contacts in the workplace. On the other hand, this moment of "forced renewal" could be the best opportunity to accelerate and implement the innovative technologies fostered for "Industry 4.0" because of the significant socioeconomic changes that it promises to bring. This paper presents a contact tracing framework based on an inexpensive and non-intrusive wearable sensor able to provide positioning data along with cardinal directions and orientation. A mixed ultra-Wide Band/Bluetooth, UWB/BLE, approach permits to know the operators' accurate position and orientation. Their interactions during working activities can be regulated by a tool that suggests the implementation of social distancing measures for contagion reduction.