Social distancing wearables are trending, and a smart solution from ProGlove can help workers maintain a proper distance from one another.
Leveraging its Mark family of wearable barcode scanners and the ProGlove Connect app for Android, ProGlove rolled out a product upgrade that activates proximity sensing for workers.
“Our key customers are sharing with us the challenges they’re facing as they rethink and retool to restart operations,” says Andreas Koenig, CEO of ProGlove. “We faced similar challenges as we reviewed our own processes for safety and efficiency. It is our natural tendency, as humans, to want to go back to doing things the way we did them before. However, it’s not possible. Proper social distancing is now key to a successful return to work.”
To help workers – on an assembly line or in a distribution center – maintain proper distance from each other, the new ProGlove Connect Proximity app provides an additional layer of feedback on an Android device alone or when paired with a ProGlove Mark barcode scanner, which rests on the employee’s hand.
When personally equipped with the Mark wearable scanner and a paired Android device, workers coming within close proximity of each other are alerted. The alerts come to workers via options on the wearable scanner, including audio sound, optic LED light and haptic vibration signals.
This is important in a busy or noisy shop floor environment where an Android alert alone in a pocket could be easily overlooked, ProGlove says.
“We tested the Mark upgrade in-house and it works beautifully,” says Konstantin Brunnbauer, vice president of production at ProGlove. “We’re now rolling it out on our own assembly line. “For my team, it is easy to want to fall back into old patterns of working together, but with this extra reminder we can maintain safe distance.”
ProGlove Connect Proximity is in beta and is phase one of the company’s software initiative to help customers manage safe social distancing in the workplace. In phase two, device-level proximity data will be made available in ProGlove’s software application. Managers can then easily identify bottlenecks in the warehouse with this information and plan for modifications to layouts, schedules or workflows.
