Keeping one and a half meters away is easier than it seems. Certainly with the help of the smart TheDistancer, which is partly thanks to a high-tech company Variass has been developed. No bigger than a car key, the little device with the colors red, orange and green tells whether someone is inside, outside or exactly one and a half meters away. ’’With TheDistancer, we are helping to prevent corona infections.''
Walking on the Grote Markt in Groningen, just after the announcement of the lockdown, entrepreneur Leon Fock how people struggle with keeping one-and-a-half feet of distance. ’’For everyone, it feels unusual. Surely it should be possible to make keeping distance easy with a simple device.'' At home, he set to work with a soldering iron, resulting in a small device that uses color signals to indicate whether someone is keeping enough distance. A friend is immediately enthusiastic but, like Fock, cannot produce it. Henk Smid of the high-tech company Variass is asked to do so.
Urgent
Smid, too, is enthusiastic. ’’If you can contribute to the solution of a very urgent social issue, then you do it.’’ Together they discuss what the device must meet and a team of specialists at Variass succeeds in having a working prototype within a few weeks. ''Normally such a process takes months, but we have the knowledge to reduce process structures by a few steps in order to quickly get from idea to product,'' Smid explains.
Brooch
With the size of a car key, the device can be worn as a brooch or pendant. The first eight samples will be tried out in a healthcare institution ’s Heeren Loo for the mentally handicapped. Keeping distance from each other is virtually impossible for mentally handicapped and elderly people with dementia. Touch is an important way for them to make contact. Moreover, explaining why keeping a distance is necessary is often difficult. TheDistancer seems to be a solution here.
Practice
How does TheDistancer work? Using the colors of a traffic light, it alerts the wearer when someone else is getting too close. Red if someone gets closer than a meter and a half, orange for 1.5 to 2 meters is and green if someone stays at a safe distance. No beeps and no vibration, making the device incentive-free. It also works without an Internet connection. So no data is collected and stored, which fits with security and privacy standards in healthcare. ’’Anyone can wear the device,’’ Smid said. ''This is how we are trying to make a concrete contribution to preventing infection with the coronavirus.''
TheDistancer goes into production in July.