Universal Contact Tracing from Microshare Hits the Global Radar
LONDON, May 1 – Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing solution, which closes important loopholes and drawbacks in the smartphone based approach under development by Apple and Google, was featured on the front page of The Financial Times on April 27, the start of a scorching week of global exposure for the Philadelphia-based company’s innovative products.
The FT, the world’s premier financial newspaper, noted that Microshare’s approach relies on inexpensive Bluetooth beacons in wristbands, nametags or keyrings, providing implicit consent on the part of those being traced, a controversial problem dogging the smartphone approach. Universal Contact Tracing, the newspaper said, is “a better alternative to the project that Google and Apple have devised based around using a smartphone’s Bluetooth signal.”
The Microshare approach, which uses LoRaWAN low power, wide-area gateways rather than expensive cell phone or GPS data, will work in settings like factories, military barracks, on ships and in retirement homes where smartphone use is impractical or even forbidden. What’s more, the smartphone approach creates enormous inequities in poor regions, among the elderly and is vulnerable to individual users switching off GPS or batteries simply dying.
“It’s really a stunning blind spot of [the Apple-Google] approach to think that there’s somehow been universal adoption of smartphones,” Microshare’s Chief Risk & Sustainability Officer, Michael Moran, is quoted as saying. “It’s just not true. And in fact the most vulnerable populations in the world are exactly the ones that don’t have them.”
Microshare’s solution, subsequently covered by Fortune, the Daily Mail, the Washington Post and others, is being deployed globally in the manufacturing facilities of a major pharmaceutical firm.
The Daily Mail noted that “instead of relying on a smartphone, it gives employees Bluetooth-enabled key-rings, badges or wristbands to track their movements,” which brings an implicit consent into the picture. The smartphone approach has been critized for its potential civil liberties implications.
The Microshare solution, the report continues, “record(s) when they come into contact with another and upload the ‘encounters’ to a central database. This information is then stored in a secure database that is searchable and auditable for historic patterns,” and the LoRaWAN-based network operates completely separate from sensitive corporate databases, posing a much lower cyber security threat.
Microshare CEO Ron Rock, in a series of interview with The New York Times, Fast Company, and the impact and ESG investor platform Karma Impact, described the furious pace of innovation at the firm as one of the benefits of being young, hungry, nimble, and stocked with very smart people who care about solving the world’s problems.
The drawback to the Apple-Google project, and many of the rival services being developed, is that they rely on everyone carrying smartphones, Rock told Karma Impact. “Most people don’t have smartphones” in the developing world, and there are places in the developed world where they are forbidden or just impractical.
Microshare’s CEO, speaking with Fast Company, emphasized that there are locations, including workplaces, where cellphones aren’t permitted or are frequently left in lockers or cars, making them ineffective at tracking exposure. Building on our existing Asset Zoning solution, which tracks the location of items such as hospital beds and wheelchairs, Microshare “developed Fitbit-style wearable Bluetooth devices. They can be used for workplace proximity tracing even where cellphones aren’t allowed. ‘We realized that tracking employees inside a building wasn’t dissimilar to tracking hospital beds,” says Microshare cofounder and CEO Ron Rock’.”
In South Asia, India Analytics Magazine – a kind of subcontinental version of WIRED – carried a report on the advantages of Microshare’s Bluetooth – LoRaWAN approach. Another Indian tech outlet, iMore, noted in its story that on Microshare’s approach that Universal Contact Tracing recognizes that smartphone-based contact tracing using apps assumes the universal adoption of smartphones, which could in fact mean the most vulnerable groups in society are left out. … Microshare, is reportedly proposing the use of Bluetooth items like badges and wristbands to make contact tracing more effective.”
Microshare’s Universal Contact Tracing is available now for quick deployment across the globe.