- If the epidemic seems to be "under control", compliance with barrier measures remains topical to avoid any risk of spreading the coronavirus.
- To help us keep the meter in the context of physical distance, Invoxia launches its Spacing Companion.
- Dedicated to businesses, this small beeper alerts in the event of too close proximity to another employee.
One meter no less! To help us respect the barrier gestures at work, the French company Invoxia has imagined the Spacing Companion. This small device that fits in your pocket alert when you get too close to your colleagues. Or the opposite.
A beeper to wear constantly
The reflexes of the world before are naturally still alive. Certainly, we understood that handshakes or kisses should be banned from companies for a certain time. It remains to respect the meter of distance required to continue to protect themselves and their colleagues from any risk of transmission of the Covid: 19. With Spacing Companion, Invoxia has its solution. “The idea is that of a little beeper that you always carry around at work. If you are absorbed in your task or inadvertently find yourself too close to a colleague, the device will emit an alert beep, ”explains Amélie Caudron, CEO of Invoxia , to 20 Minutes .
Created by Eric Carrell (the CEO of Withings), the Invoxia company had distinguished itself until then by its GPS trackers allowing to find dogs, cats, bikes, objects… This time, no question of cookie, even if the Spacing Companion, sold 70 euros HT, looks like two drops of water to the brand's GPS tracker. "We reused the hardware bricks of our tracker, but we reviewed the software aspect and prototyped the product in just two weeks", explains Amélie Caudron. Several hundred Spacing Companion units are currently being tested by major players in the CAC 40 industry and by one of the leaders in distribution in France. For the time being, Invoxia does not officialize any name.
Each employee must be equipped
Anonymous, to be placed in a pocket as soon as you take up your post and to be returned in the evening when you leave your work, the device has an autonomy of about a week. Constraint: each employee of a site that we want to protect must be equipped with it. "All areas of the company are not necessarily in danger, it is rather on industrial sites, construction sites, warehouses that we will need," reassures the general manager of Invoxia.
Concretely, the Spacing Companion speak to each other. How? 'Or' What ? By transmitting and crossing different radio waves using the Bluetooth and Lora transmission protocols. The devices thus continuously calculate the strength of the radio signals received to deduce the distance between them. If this (configurable) is too short, the alert is given. Well seen: the Spacing Companion only emits every 3 seconds to avoid nuisance beeps when you meet someone. And it is harmless: "it emits infinitely fewer waves than a smartphone," reassures Amélie Caudro.
A stimulus tool for tourism
How is the Spacing Companion perceived by those who are already testing it? "We see that after a few days of use, the equipment becomes a preventive tool: the employees who wear it have acquired the right reflexes and avoid making it ring," we note at Invoxia. The simplicity of the object also seems appreciated. Anyone coming from outside can be instantly equipped when entering a building. Question however: while the epidemic seems under control in France, is not the Spacing Companion already obsolete? “We see that in Asian countries, this period of distancing lasts. We are talking about new habits to take for several months ”, tempers Amélie Caudron. Invoxia also imagines that its Spacing Companion could be a good tool for reviving tourism in monuments or museums where a fair distance will still have to be respected between visitors for a while. And in the end, Invoxia will offer an exchange program to transform the little beeper into a GPS beacon. So, the idea will obviously not be to track employees of a company by monitoring their movements, but to provide them with a tracker allowing, for example, to remotely locate equipment, such as a laptop which could have been stolen.
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