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AI digitises coronavirus management

NEC XON is using the NeoFace Watch facial recognition platform and specialised thermography cameras that include optical lenses to measure skin temperature and visually identify employees and visitors to its premises.

The solution digitises the processes around reporting and managing COVID-19, employee and visitor health and safety, and provides businesses with a compliant, automated system for contact tracing.

Jannie Erasmus.

“Employee and visitor safety is a priority for many organisations now,” says Eugene le Roux, chief executive for Africa at NEC XON. “It’s now law under the Disaster Management Act to wear a mask at all times when in a public place, such as an office building, as well as to manage the numbers of employees and visitors on the premises at any given time. This solution was designed to automate that process with the necessary alerts sent directly to the company’s pandemic management and response team so that we are always informed and can act immediately and from an informed basis should we need to.”

The system registers people visually as they enter the premises, accurately identifies them against the employee database, even while they are wearing their masks or links their picture to their identity if they are a visitor. Once connected to the Wi-Fi on premises, it automatically sends a digital COVID-19 questionnaire to their phone and stores the answers in the database. Having performed all three parts of the process, it then grants them access to the premises.

Once on the premises, NEC XON then performs behaviour analysis like mask detection and social distancing on the platform to ensure compliance in its building. It also monitors the number of people on the premises and flags alerts to appropriate people at specified thresholds so that the responsible team can fully manage the environment.

“Employees can also pre-register expected visitors on the system to speed up the entry process in addition to gaining the digitised automation and compliance capabilities,” says Jannie Erasmus, business unit head of Surveillance and Analytics at NEC XON.

“The solution is fully POPI compliant and the platform it is based on, NeoFace Watch, was developed in the UK so that is also GDPR-compliant. The facial recognition and behavioural analytics platform has been running successfully around the world and in Nairobi, Mombasa and several other locations in Africa for several years,” he adds.

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