Cleaning

HEALTHY BUILDINGS

Guarding against COVID-19 starts at the office door with technology

Employees at Fresh Prep Foods Inc. must check in at an AI-powered kiosk for touchless health checks before continuing into the Vancouver facility | SUBMITTED

TYLER ORTON

Employer mandates that require workers to get vaccinated against COVID-19 are unlikely to come to pass in B.C., say legal experts.

Instead, provisions to ensure the workplace is safe — such as requiring masks for unvaccinated workers — will be needed.

And new technologies are also emerging to ensure visitors and workers stepping inside a building are COVID-free.

Prior to the pandemic, Traction Guest CEO Keith Metcalfe says his firm’s contactless screening technology was often considered a “nice-to-have” addition to the office.

“Now what’s happened as a result of the pandemic is we’ve started to really find companies coming to us saying, ‘We need to have this,’” he says.

His Burnaby-based startup specializes in visitor management technology for companies.

Guests who have already been invited to an office via Traction’s platform receive an email with all the details of their visit, such as safety requirements.

Visitors click on a link that takes them to a registration portal and they can then use their smartphone to scan in on a company iPad without touching any surfaces.

The registration portal, accessed through a web application, takes visitors to a company’s customized website that might require visitors to sign documents or watch a safety video before being permitted to enter.

Traction Guest conducted a survey in December revealing 38% of employers plan to have 75% in-office capacity by this summer, putting a further burden on health and safety measures in the coming months.

“How do you manage the complexity of that?” says Metcalfe. “That’s where

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we come into play and we don’t think that’s going away. We think the world has somewhat shifted about this whole notion that employers are going to make every employee come in 8-5.”

Not too far from Traction Guest’s own offices, about 10,000 deliveries flow out the doors of the Fresh Prep Foods Inc. production facility on Vancouver’s Victoria Drive each week.

The meal-kit service has seen an uptick in demand amid the pandemic and does not count itself among those B.C. businesses with the luxury of sending most employees home to work amid the pandemic.

“Being a meal-kit delivery food service that people are actually really relying and depending on right now means that we need to prioritize the health and safety of our staff to prevent interruptions in our service,” says co-CEO Becky Brauer.

In a bid to mitigate health concerns at the busy workplace, Fresh Prep turned to Vancouver’s Intuitive AI for some hygiene help.

Now, anyone entering Fresh Prep’s facility is greeted by an “Oscar Hygiene” terminal featuring a display with a camera at the top and a hand-sanitization unit below.

The display may prompt visitors to sanitize their hands or answer a symptom questionnaire, while a thermal camera confirms their temperature before checking them in and reminding users to put on a face mask.

Brauer recalls that prior to Oscar’s installation, staff had to check in at a single access point and fill out the necessary paperwork before entering the premises.

“When you have a lot of people checking into a building in a short period of time, you can quickly start to see things like queues forming and lineups, and that’s just obviously not good for your COVID safety plan,” she says.

Intuitive AI got its start deploying scanning devices backed by artificial intelligence (AI) in locations such as Vancouver International Airport and Simon Fraser University to visually identify the difference between recycling and trash.

Those particular devices, which feature cameras and large displays attached to garbage and recycling bins, can then direct users to the proper bin in which to place discarded items when they approach.

Intuitive AI’s investors recognized the potential for the technology behind those devices to influence hygiene behaviour in hospitals as medical professionals walked into different spaces.

“That’s something that they were nudging us towards and we were already working towards a solution for hand hygiene. And then COVID happened,” says Intuitive AI CEO Hassan Murad.

The repurposing of pre-existing technology has also led to the development of other scanning devices from B.C. companies.

Tevano Systems was previously best known for specializing in systems for contactless payments.

Last November, the Vancouver firm began deploying its Health Shield devices for people visiting sites such as food distribution plants or transportation hubs. The scanning devices, which cost less than $2,000 per unit, use thermal imaging for temperature checks and AIpowered facial recognition to determine if users are wearing face masks.

“We realized that we actually had the essential tool sets as a platform in place,” says CEO David Bajwa.

Bajwa also believes that the very presence of these types of scanning devices can act as a deterrent to those who may wish to enter buildings even if they know they’re feeling ill.

Office space

CELLPHONE TRACKING

Index shows Vancouver’s back-to-office traffic down 63% from pre-pandemic levels

FRANK O’BRIEN

Anew interactive, real-time database that tracks cellphones used by “representative office occupiers” in major North American cities reveals that Vancouver foot traffic is down 63.3% today compared with March 2, 2020, a week before the global pandemic was declared.

The Vitality Index was developed by commercial real estate agency Avison Young using data from Orbital Insight, which aggregates anonymized cellphone location data geo-fenced to unique locations to estimate total foot traffic in each city and industry.

The data, which tracks 20 North American cities, goes back to June 2019 in the U.S. and the beginning of 2020 in Canada, which allows comparisons to prepandemic levels.

“The Vitality Index is wildly important for people looking to understand what is happening in real-time and over time in major markets. It measures the pace so that leaders can make decisions based on concrete information and analytics,” says Sheila Botting, Avison Young’s president of professional services for the Americas.

The index is revealing, and likely unnerving, for employers who were counting on a widespread return to the office this September.

The cellphone tracking shows that total foot traffic in all 20 commercial cores profiled has fallen by 76.3% from prepandemic levels.

In Vancouver, recent traffic for what the index refers to as downtown office workers is down 63.3% from numbers prior to the

COVID-19’s fourth wave has delayed the return of workers to offices in downtown Vancouver and other major urban business centres in Canada | CHUNG CHOW

pandemic. On March 2, 2020, for example, a week before the global pandemic was declared, a daily average of more than 4,700 office workers was detected. As of September 6, 2021, that number had fallen to 1,900.

Traffic in Calgary is down 55.2% this month compared with pre-pandemic levels, while Toronto office-worker traffic has plunged 85.2% from March 2, 2020, the data shows.

The index can be custom-tuned to compare any dates. It reveals, for example, that in the week following the July 1, 2021, announcement of the return of health restrictions in B.C., downtown foot traffic fell by 4.2%.

Botting notes that the Vitality Index is showing a steady increase in foot traffic in major cities this year, but is still trending significantly below pre-pandemic levels. The widespread return in the fall that many hoped for has yet to materialize. In fact, the whole nature of office work has apparently undergone a fundamental shift, the index suggests.