Social economy and economic recovery after the covid-19 crisis

The crisis derived from the covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the need to improve and review our model of economy and society. It has been evidenced the importance of giving greater relevance to science, the use of knowledge, and the incorporation of values related to sustainability and solidarity. Based on the financial resources provided by the European Union, the member states have designed plans aimed at overcoming the health, economic and social crisis as well as the previous existing imbalances. In this context, and considering a country like Spain, with a business structure characterized by the small business size, the involvement of Social Economy entities could be a guarantee for the good use of the European funding deployed, due to the resilience generated by the network of mutual support and the ability to promote collective projects that combine the economic with the social, favoring the development of spaces. But, in this case, it seems that the weaknesses of many Social Economy entities, related to their small size, have been able to play against the sector. With the caution due to the data provisionality, it can be said that the pandemic has also truncated the growth trend in the business size of the sector. Of the different families of the Social Economy, and compared with the whole of the Spanish productive fabric, cooperatives have been the companies that have resisted the best, both in the number of companies and in employment, and labor societies the worst.

A Low-Cost Control Occupancy Solution Using a Time-of-Flight Ranging Sensor Laser

The pandemic situation has driven to several measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19. One of these measures is social distance and, as a consequence, limitation of capacity of indoor closed spaces. This makes necessary the deployment of systems that help to control occupancy of spaces. This work proposes a low-cost system to control access to an indoor closed space with a single door. The system is based in a two laser Time-of-Flight sensors VL53L0X over a HiLetgo UNO R3D1R32 ESP32 micro-controller. The system counts the occupancy of the room and share it with a database and a dashboard, using Node-RED. The tested prototype shows a 86.6% reliability that increases to a 100% reliability when users are informed to enter or exit one by one. The main contributions of this work are: to control capacity of one-entrance indoor closed space with a low cost open system;and to record occupancy of the room in order to analyse it behaviour with time. © 2021 Copyright for this paper by its authors.