Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing on front of The Financial Times
LONDON, April 26, 2020 – Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing solution graced the front page of the world’s leading financial newspaper, The Financial Times, as it and outlets across the world began reckoning with the need to deploy systems that will safeguard building occupants once the global economy starts to reopen.
Universal Contact Tracing, a cost effective and quick-to-deploy solution that avoids the technological and privacy pitfalls of smartphone apps, is currently being deployed on three continents for governments, multinational corporations in healthcare, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals and commercial real estate.
The Microshare solution is based on proven Bluetooth beacon technology embedded in anonymized wearables (wristbands and badges) with multi-year battery lives. The signals, including defined “contact events” that health officials need to identify, are then backhauled with secure LoRaWAN low-wave networks that have no connection (and thus provide no route into) sensitive corporate computer networks.
The FT piece, which appeared just below the fold in the April 20 print edition, devotes considerable space to Microshare’s view that smartphone-based apps like those being promoted by an Apple-Google consortium, will fail to protect workers in many situations and, ironically, leave the elderly and the poor – those arguably most at risk for COVID-19, unprotected.
As the article notes:
“Microshare’s “Universal Contact Tracing” would see employees wear badges, key rings or wristbands embedded with inexpensive Bluetooth beacons. Try our newsletter on Asia’s tech sector Free four-week trial of the Tech Scroll Asia newsletter Get the newsletter Michael Moran, chief risk and sustainability officer at the Philadelphia-based company, said this was a better alternative to the project that Google and Apple have devised based around using a smartphone’s Bluetooth signal. “It’s really a stunning blind spot of [the Apple-Google] approach to think that there’s somehow been universal adoption of smartphones,” he said. “It’s just not true. And in fact the most vulnerable populations in the world are exactly the ones that don’t have them.”
The read the full article, go to The Financial Times website (subscription required): https://www.ft.com/content/caeb250b-8d8b-4eaa-969c-62a8b58464aa