Safety At Work: How Can Businesses Achieve Contactless Buildings?
By Lee Jasper, Head of Products and Solutions at Johnson Controls
We’re finally beginning to return to some sense of normality. As we begin returning to work, we’ll be entering a new world with a greater focus on public safety than ever before in our lifetimes. With the opening of non-essential stores in June, retailers were among the first to face the challenge of enforcing social distancing in stores. As office buildings, schools, hotels, entertainment venues and other spaces reopen their doors, we’ll see this taken a step further by businesses, who must try to instil confidence by showing how staff and visitors can be protected.
In this ‘new normal,’ buildings will play a fundamental role in keeping people safe. Ready-made to integrate with new systems, smart buildings will enable the rise of contactless facilities – and regular buildings will have to become smarter to do the same. Technology will act as an additional layer of protection to minimise physical contact, and ultimately limit any potential spread of COVID-19.
The contactless building is set to become the norm as workplaces and buildings transition out of lockdown. But how will they take shape?
Eliminating Physical Contact
Beginning with its defining characteristic, workplaces and buildings are becoming ‘contactless’ in a bid to improve hygiene as we transition out of lockdown. Designed to ensure visitors have no need for physical contact during their time at a facility, the aim of contactless buildings is to protect staff, visitors and operations – this can be achieved through the removal of physical tokens like access control cards to eliminate contact with doors, scanners and buttons.
There are countless factors for building managers to consider. This includes simple solutions which we take for granted, such as automatic doors, as well as innovative takes on traditional methods – such as viricidal and gel-dispensing door handles. It also includes emerging technologies: here, facial recognition and biometrics come into play as a means of access control. Rather than relying on access cards, lanyards and buttons, users can gain access simply by waving their hand over touchless sensors. Through the application of biometrics, businesses can improve security and bring peace of mind to users by removing the need for contact with physical building infrastructure.
The increasing role of smart facilities in recent years means that many buildings are now ready-made to integrate with these new technologies. Coupled with the fact that many of these solutions are compatible with existing access control systems, this means there is no need to make considerable investments. Instead, the majority of cases will involve a simple retrofit, allowing businesses to ensure a frictionless access experience for building occupants and visitors.
Keeping Building Occupants Safe
Contactless buildings will play an integral role in limiting the spread of COVID-19 within office spaces, leisure spaces, and countless other facilities. However, it’s worth noting that their success is reliant on the building being free from the virus in the first place.
Building managers are therefore met with the considerable task of trying to keep facilities free of individuals who display potential symptoms. Here, body thermal detection technology can give security teams a first-line filter to identify those entering premises who may have an elevated body temperature. These systems act as a dual-technology, out-of-the-box extension of a standard CCTV camera. In practice, they are used to measure the temperature of a person and alert an operator if anyone with an elevated temperature enters a building.
Body thermal detection cameras are a useful tool to control the potential spread of the virus. However, it’s important to emphasise that they are not a silver bullet and cannot diagnose any medical conditions or illnesses. Rather, the technology helps to identify the people most likely to infect those around them – one small step in the many it will take to protect the public. While the cameras are capable of measuring up to 40 individuals at once, right now the need is largely for organisations who have dramatically reduced the flow of people to facilitate social distancing. However, we may see larger venues starting to use them in more crowded settings once social distancing measures are eased further.
Controlling The Crowds
Where queueing systems can be implemented at entrances to control the crowds, there are other, more efficient methods by which this can be achieved. To this end, organisations can turn to capacity control systems to manage the number of people on-site and reduce or limit contact between people. Similar to thermal detection cameras, the systems integrate with existing CCTV systems and use video analytics to count the number of people going in and out of a building – when a maximum occupancy level is reached, alerts can be sent and actioned for workers to respond appropriately.
Capacity control systems help organisations ensure social distancing measures are adhered to. This is crucial for those companies which have to prove they are keeping within occupancy tolerance to remain open. What’s more, the systems employ a data-driven approach, meaning there is little room for error. This removes the reliance on workers and security guards to count building entrants in or out and think on their feet. Here, technology will ease the pressure on workers enormously.
Stronger Together
While it remains to be seen how COVID-19 will change the way in which we all operate, contactless buildings will help businesses operate safely and efficiently during these constantly evolving times.
Each of these solutions is more than capable as a standalone measure to support operations. That said, using them in conjunction with each other will bring contactless buildings into the mainstream, and help keep people as safe as possible. Together, these solutions play an integral role in tackling ongoing continuity challenges, and ensure businesses are prepared for what the ‘new normal’ holds.
