The need

There is no doubt that our way of living will be different after COVID-19.

New prevention mechanisms are required to be deployed in order to help the society recover as much as possible of the former way of living.

For instance, office buildings and shopping centers are places where people coexist in small spaces and therefore are subject to additional control to minimize infections.

The solution

The Everpaths platform is a location and wayfinding solution that helps building tenants to deal with business capacity control and social distance recommendations.

With Everpaths you can count the number of people in the building, in a room or in any given area and send push messages to the users when detecting a potential risk.

By checking this counters against the desired maximum capacity, Everpaths can send alarms messages to the user’s smartphones when detecting high occupancy situations.

At the building, users must be running in their smartphones one of the two available apps for the Everpaths platform, either the full app with user interface, or the silent tracker app in background.

The tracker app periodically sends to the cloud the smartphone location, and the full app in addition also offers indoor maps, routes and contents to the user.

Both apps work detecting bluetooth beacons to resolve the indoor location. These beacons are associated to Everpaths nodes. A node is a small area where someone could be, for example inside a circle of 1.5m radius. The circle size is function of how many beacons you deploy. The more beacons the smaller the circle is.

This is how it works:

1. Every time an app resolves its location the location data is also kept in the cloud database for statistical purposes.
2. Then a process counts how many people are in every node of the building.
3. A node could refer to a room or just to a part of it. So we can count how many people is in a room or in given area.
4. The building administrator can define the maximum number of people in every room or in specific areas by setting the capacity limits per node.
5. In case of an excess, every smartphone in the control node affected will receive a push notification alerting to be aware that there is a risk of reduced social distance in that specific area. This event will optionally raise and alert that is sent to the security responsible for the building.
6. The overall occupancy of every control node is also supervised in real time through the heat map.  
   
7. If you have activated the user identification functionality, in case of an infection you can list which other users have been in contact with the infected user, and the affected areas of the building.
8. Finally, for prevention, reminders and good practices, advices can be sent as push messages to the users when required.