For the casual visitor, stepping into one of contact tracing app Contatrack.ai’s client sites can be a discomforting experience. Immediately upon crossing the threshold, one is quickly aware of a close-circuit television camera installed prominently on the ceiling and pointed squarely in one’s direction. With around three of such devices installed throughout the office, some uninitiated guests may quickly get the eerie sensation of being watched.
But this is no dystopian corporate panopticon — the cameras are part of Indian-based IoT firm Hipla’s contact tracing solution in the fight against Covid-19. The devices allow firms to identify breaches of social distancing and mask-wearing regulations and detect patterns in human flow of traffic. With this information, says co-founder and CEO Sandeep Kaul, companies will be able to better enforce social distancing rules and develop policies to reduce potential spread of Covid-19.
Such technologies are not new for the Internet of Things (IoT) firm. Based in India and Southeast Asia, the firm has long been developing human tracking and people-finding solutions for large enterprises such as universities and warehouses. Such technologies had previously been used largely for wayfinding during emergency and disaster management, as well as during large-scale MICE events where finding people can be like searching for a needle in a haystack.
“One of our customers asked us when the Covid-19 pandemic hit whether we could build on our existing solutions for people tracking for contact tracing,” Kaul tells The Edge Singapore. While most countries tend to have their own national contact tracing apps for general use, Hipla’s CEO notes that businesses often have bespoke use cases that require more tailored solutions. The app is geofenced to operate within specific workplaces rather than outside it, where government solutions like TraceTogether and SafeEntry are more appropriate.
“At the base is always a proximity-based solution. Many companies are using this for occupancy calculation and crowd density,” notes Kaul. Management typically uses these devices to shape workplace policies to ensure better social distancing. For instance, businesses may want to stagger lunch breaks if they find too many workers heading off for meals at the same time, increasing risk of social contact.
So versatile is the app, moreover, that some firms have even begun using it for workplace communication and marking attendance. Kaul and his team had not foreseen such uses when they first began developing Contatrack.ai. “We are learning every day how people are using our products,” he laughs.
The system makes use of bluetooth connection in mobile devices to detect breaches in social distancing regulations, with Kaul’s phone ringing at regular intervals through our interview as it picked up on contact tracing breaches at the client site. Additionally, the video cameras — installed primarily in common spaces throughout the office — also allows firms to see which workers are not wearing a mask at work.
All this data is collected in an easy-to-use dashboard that tracks incidences of non-compliance and both the time and location of breaches. A formula is also used to calculate a risk score to help management assess the extent to which social distancing is observed. The use-site The Edge Singapore visited even had a large television monitor in its main lobby, where camera footage of social distancing offenders were prominently displayed for “naming and shaming”.
Safety first
All this, of course, could potentially unsettle workers, who may resent having their movements tracked throughout the office. Indeed, the dashboard is able to reveal which individuals have breached social distancing down to the second when the offence was committed. One might therefore imagine that workers are uncomfortable with being monitored all the time.
But from initial observation, at least, workers appear unperturbed by the existence of these “monitoring devices”. One worker even readily agreed to “model” the app for our video at our request — a woman described as the “expert” on the new app. She even offered to stay longer and show us more features of the app as we wrapped up the interview.
Perhaps the workers’ comfort with this “dystopian” technology stems from the approach that Hipla has taken towards privacy and cybersecurity. According to Kaul, Contatrack.ai tries to be absolutely transparent about the need for contact tracing systems within a workplace community to encourage buyin from workers. The firm also communicates how the technology works clearly and simply to clients through common analogies and vernacular languages.
At the IT level, the firm uses state-of-theart encryption technology to protect user data. The experience of the FinTech industry, which has made great strides in terms of data privacy, have provided important lessons to Hipla in data privacy. Data collected by Contatrack. ai is protected by cutting-edge technologies and practices adapted from the fintech world such as tokenisation.
Contatrack.ai is compliant with the Personal Data Protection Act and General Data Protection Regulation, says Hipla’s head of strategy & corporate development Sagnik Banerjee. All data collected is deleted after 14 days as per World Health Organization guidelines. The data is also stored on Amazon Web Services’ Cloud system — a private and secure storage space. Banerjee adds that data collected is also narrowly defined as required for collection by analytics, ensuring that only information essential for contact tracing is collected.
“Compliance in the workplace will become very important [in future]. This will also become an important factor for employees to choose employers. I would want to know if my employer cares enough; whether he has prevention and tools for disease prevention and compliances,” predicts Kaul. Contatrack.ai, he believes, will play a pivotal role in helping companies answer this demand from the workforce of the future.
Post-Covid leaders
At the moment, Hipla is a small outfit with a headcount of just 26 across four Indian cities and Singapore. The Singapore office has only three people at the moment. But the young start-up is increasingly punching above its weight, with Contatrack.ai pulling in high profile clients including Fortune 500 companies and a large Korean electronics manufacturer.
Kaul is bullish about the prospects for the market, which he sees as being more about employee well-being, safety and security than contact tracing alone. He believes that contact tracing solutions will increasingly become more frictionless after the pandemic, leading to increased take up-rates over time. “It’s really going to become the ‘new normal’; we won’t even realise that yes, contact tracing is happening,” he tells The Edge Singapore, convinced that contact tracing will become an irrevocable part of life after the pandemic.
Contact tracing technology has other uses too. Firms can use such technology, say Kaul and Sagnik, to improve workplace productivity, workplace communication and workforce management. It is all about productivity, Kaul says, with contact tracing potentially allowing businesses to manage one’s workforce economically on a real-time basis.
Not to say that the process has been entirely smooth sailing, however. Workplace closures as a result of lockdown measures have made it hard to gather business leaders together to conduct sales, says Kaul. “It is very difficult to demonstrate contact tracing without some form of contact with one another,” quips the CEO. Despite remote work being likely to increase in relevance post-Covid-19, Kaul sees physical workspaces like hospitals, schools and warehouses presenting lucrative business opportunities going forward.
At the moment, Hipla is raising pre-Series A funding with an eye to future growth, with the intention to pursue a strong path of expansion upon the conclusion of this present funding round. “We want to be bold: because we are small, we have to know how to punch above our weight. We produce good technology, we produce it with sincerity, but most importantly we want to take bold steps. It is not a half-hearted approach,” Kaul declares.
