Virtual Safety Assistant: An Efficient Tool for Ensuring Safety During Covid-19 Pandemic

ABSTRACT

Using intelligent virtual assistants for controlling employee population in workspaces is a research area that remains unexplored. This paper presents a novel application of virtual humans to enforce Covid-19 safety measures in a corporate workplace. For this purpose, we develop a virtual assistant platform, Chloe, equipped with automatic temperature sensing, facial recognition, and dedicated chatbots to act as an initial filter for ensuring public health. Whilst providing an engaging user interaction experience, Chloe minimizes human to human contact, thus reducing the spread of infectious diseases. Chloe restricts the employee population within the office to government-approved safety norms. We experimented with Chloe as a virtual safety assistant in a company, where she interacted and screened the employees for Covid-19 symptoms. Participants filled an online survey to quantify Chloe’s performance in terms of interactivity, system latency, engagement, and accuracy, for which we received positive feedback. We performed statistical analysis on the survey results that reveal positive results and show effectiveness of Chloe in such applications. We detail system architecture, results and limitations. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.