Last 12 October, during the SMAU Live Show staged at the MiCo in Milan, General Manager of EDiM, Fabrizio Sanna, was presented with the SMAU 2021 Innovation Award, given to the most innovative digital transformation designs and the best innovative strategies currently in use.
Specifically, the award was presented to EDiM for the Safety Bubble Device, an item of PPE, developed in collaboration with the start-up IoTALAB and created to monitor social distancing in the company. The device was first provided to the EDiM workers operating in the Villasanta site during the first wave of the pandemic: using Bluetooth technology, it alerts the workers by vibrating and sounding an acoustic alarm when the minimum safety distances between colleagues are not respected. In addition, it also enables any contacts at risk lasting over 3 seconds to be recorded. At the end of the working day, a receiving antenna enables the data to be downloaded from the individual devices, registering any contacts at risk that have been made.

Lastly, the system is integrated with infra-red cameras positioned at the entrance to the company, which take the temperature of all those admitted to the premises. All this has enabled EDiM to keep working throughout the pandemic and to limit the periods of preventative quarantine to only include workers who had effectively come into contact with a risk of contagion.
In addition to ensuring safety in the workplace, the Safety Bubble Device also guarantees compliance with the privacy regulations and the Workers’ Statute, since it does not register the people involved, but rather tracks the events. In fact, if a worker communicates that they have tested positive for Covid-19, the Health Protection Agency (ATS) is the only authority authorised to access the database and, using analytical software, it is capable of tracing all direct and indirect contacts that have occurred among colleagues, in just a few seconds. This way, the measures and health protocols envisaged in these cases can immediately be activated.

And after the pandemic? In this period, several tests on additional uses of the device are ongoing. Without tracking the workers, the Safety Bubble Device is already being used today to detect when a given area and/or the “hotspots” of the company, such as the cafeteria, corridors and changing rooms, reach their maximum capacity in terms of people, helping to improve their management. In the future, it could be used, for example, to restrict access to the production areas, only admitting those effectively authorised to enter, and to signal cases in which people forget to, or incorrectly use, the PPE, again helping to boost the safety levels in the workplace.