Wearable Helps You Maintain Social Distancing

As indoor spaces including offices, museum and cultural spaces and bars and leisure spaces start to open up again, keeping safe distance from other people is paramount in public safety and maintaining low COVID-19 transmission levels. But judging safe social distancing and maintaining it indoors is often near-impossible.

The Proxemy Bubble is an easy to use wearable monitor that senses when you are too close to someone for too long and notifies you to move, guiding you to maintain safe distance. The small device can be worn as a lanyard or bracelet and as they do not rely on bluetooth, can be reliably used in any semi-public or indoor setting. The Bubble can be applied in offices, museums or leisure spaces to allow visitors and workers to maintain distance and feel at ease or in hospitality and retail spaces where there might be even more limited space to distance yourself.

While work and leisure places are not returning to normal yet, we are starting to see the practical and emotional difficulty in returning to these semi-public and indoor spaces without measures that ensure social distancing and public safety. Crowded public spaces and returning to workplaces can cause great stress and anxiety. Yet we are seeing the risks of opening public and indoor spaces too soon have already emerged as local lockdowns have been employed in various areas globally which raises the question of whether this is another technological solution to a more complicated issue and where and how effectively Proxemy and similar technologies can limit COVID-19 transmission. 

Proxemy and other social distancing technologies will certainly work well in offices and large, open spaces such as museums, provided there are other measures such as limited capacities and face coverings. But as we are already seeing, in order for social distancing ‘solutions’ to work they must have clear instructions and be well-implemented so that there is no need or desire to break the rules.