Laird Connectivity (United States) - POM Tracer was looking to create an easy-to-implement product that would allow businesses and organizations to safely return employees to their offices to mitigate the risk of future shutdowns due to COVID-19.

The Challenge:

As we’re all painfully aware, due to COVID-19, many businesses, factories, and universities (among other organizations) both across the United States and globally were forced to shut down, relocate their workers to home offices, or greatly cut back on their workforces out of a need for the health and safety of both employees and customers. Even though business communities are beginning to reopen, the need for health and safety does not disappear. Thus, strategies like contact tracing are important elements in any effective reopening plan.

What exactly is contact tracing? Contact tracing is a monitoring process that ‘connects-the-dots’ between people who have been infected with the COVID-19 virus and those with whom they’ve come in contact. Those who have come in contact with a person who is confirmed as infected are made aware of the fact and, in response, their own movements and interactions can then be assessed. Contact tracing is a vital part of a process intended to stop the chain of transmission.

Although important, contact tracing is not an easy process, especially if it’s being done manually. With a fast-spreading virus such as COVID-19, timing is critical; isolating infected employees and notifying those who have come in contact must be done quickly. Not only can human contact tracers take days to retrace the employees’ steps and interactions, they can also result in unsubstantiated data. A system that automates the tracing process not only provides instantaneous data, it also mitigates non-compliance and privacy issues, making it an ideal part of the reopening process.

POM Tracer, a company based in New Jersey, was looking to create an easy-to-implement product that would allow businesses and organizations to safely return employees to their offices to mitigate the risk of future shutdowns due to COVID-19. This device-based contact tracking solution must provide accurate and privacy-focused contact tracing data that can be used to identify and notify at-risk personnel.

The Solution:

To create a successful end-to-end solution for effective contact tracing, the POM Tracer required a custom solution involving tags or sensors, a gateway, and firmware that could easily integrate with their cloud infrastructure. The combination of Laird Connectivity’s Sentrius BT510 long-range Bluetooth 5 sensors and Sentrius MG100 gateway created an out of box Bluetooth to cellular IoT system that captures and transmits data from the sensors to the gateway to the cloud via a low power LTE-M/NB-IoT connection. These Laird Connectivity products are field-tested, high performing, and regulatory certified, all of which ensured a ready-to-go hardware solution – a true necessity in POM Tracer’s hyper-accelerated timeline. 

Not only did this hardware (sensors and gateways) system meet the product needs both in quality and timeliness, Laird Connectivity also developed custom firmware, designed specifically for the POM Tracer application. 

Laird Connectivity, with its highly capable hardware design and firmware development teams as well as its scalable manufacturing capabilities, is both the hardware manufacturer and the hardware design partner for the POM Tracer contact tracing solution.

The Results:

With the urgency inherent in reopening businesses and organizations, contact tracing solutions must be introduced to the market quickly and effectively. But with the health and safety of employees on the line, a fast time-to-market isn’t enough – the contact tracing solution must also be effective and reliable. With its high-performance sensors, gateways, firmware, and cloud infrastructure, the POM Tracer is an exceptional solution for effective contact tracing within a workplace.

This out of box solution allows organizations full control over contact tracing initiatives within their workplace while also eliminating the need for employees to download a contact tracing app onto their smartphones, thus decreasing the risk of privacy breaches and non-compliance issues.

Laird Connectivity was the right partner to maximize the potential market success of this endeavor. With the benefit of Laird Connectivity’s hardware and firmware design skills, manufacturing and scaling capabilities, and its flexibility, POM Tracer was able to build a prototype within three weeks and a full production-ready solution within six to nine weeks. This final product, by using minimal tracking protocols and collecting only encrypted contact data, gathers and securely stores contact information in the POM Tracer database, allowing employers to quickly identify when there is a health risk to any of their employees or visitors to the facility.

According to Lukas Lampe, POM Tracer co-founder, “Laird Connectivity has been a truly awesome partner. They are very responsive and meet their deadlines. With creativity and determination, they were able to overcome a lot of issues during the development process.”