Our Approach

We’re a group of college students that have faced difficulties in adapting to online classes due to the coronavirus pandemic. Lately we've been wondering when we will be able to to return to 'ordinary' school. Recently, an announcement has been made by the institution's executives notifying new restrictions and regulations that are going to be applied to the next school year to maintain the integrity of all members attending the institution. Due to this, our team thought of the opportunity to take advantage of the NASA Covid challenge to provide a solution on social distancing not only to our school, but also to every sort of facilities / headquarters around the world; to have more useful information and implement the needed and required health measures.

To help the institution and its members to comply with the specified regulations regarding social distancing, we decided to develop a system and a protocol to observe people traffic in a specific zone within a certain headquarters or facilities. With this system we provide information of how many people are in a given area within a specified zone. Each device located on every zone will be calibrated according the zone’s characteristics (specifying area and maximum people there can be by complying the social distancing regulations); the software will be able to analyze different variables such as “number of people”, “ventilation”, “area size”, “traffic flow” to provide the data to every potential person entering the zone how safe it is to be there, and for them to analyze the possibility to stay on another zone that isn’t as overcrowded as the one the were originally planning to stay or to be at. The goal here, is to spread the people the most across the entire facility to avoid overcrowding and minimize the risk of infection.

To develop this device we took into consideration the quarantine-related policies in our country as well as the post-quarantine-policies that have led to many types of new social adaptations and activities. Since we are not used to this new isolation situations, we got inspired in the way  astronauts are trained to live and work at space; how they adapt to a lifestyle where there is reduced or absent social contact. We researched and found out how astronauts in the ISS use RFID technology and we decided to apply these technology to practical solutions for practicing social distancing.

Astronauts in the ISS use RFID tags to solve inventory management issues; they identify and store information. Some of the reasons they use this technology are because they allow high volume production since they are easily printable, which is good for tagging their consumables, it easily integrates barcode system, it has a high performance  with a very good read range, it helps stores data and they developed a user interface software for easily management and viewing of data.

But let’s get back to the chase: sometimes implementing these sort of systems can be very expensive, which is why we wanted to make it as cheap (and available for everyone) as possible.The main challenge wasn’t developing the system, but to make it open source and cheap as possible. That’s why we decided to develop the prototype (and part of the final product) with elements almost any tech or engineering enthusiast would have; like an arduino, some IDE languages installed on their PC’s, among others. The basic id scanner (reader board and arduino) is based on arduino and python language, and the database to work as well.

Here you can see an image of the reader prototype. 

Therefore we decided to use this technology to help us identify users, store their data and develop a counting system and interface, that will allow us to keep a count of people in a closed area and notify individuals in a place by giving them people traffic data within the site; guaranteeing trustworthy information that will avoid oversaturation of people traffic within certain zones.

►Control Counting System Development:

Device Hardware and Software:

a) PASSIVE RFID TAG: Circuit and Antenna

• A tag with an integrated circuit or chip and antenna that’ll be attached to an identification card.
• The chip stores data from the user and performs specific tasks like read-only (RO), write-once, read-many (WORM), or read-write (RW).
• The antenna detects radio-frequency (RF) waves from the reader’s signal and sends and receives data.

b) RFID READER:

• A reader located in the entrance and exit of a facility will communicate with the antenna by sending and receiving data.
• The reader board will also allow to collect information and transfer it to a computer host database. This will make it work as a counting system.

c) COMPUTER HOST:

• The reader will collect the users information and transfer it to a computer host and database.
• The data collected will differ from company or institution, but they will mostly be: the user’s name, date and time accessed, date and time left.

d) SOFTWARE INTERFACE:

• The interface will show important information for the user. It will also allow them to see the count of people kept at a specific area.
• The interface will show the data that was previously collected and deny or provide access to a certain space, depending on the safety factors taken into account.

   Advantages of using RFID tags:

• Can be attached anywhere, as long it isn’t pasted on a metallic surface. So for someone to have, they can paste it either on their phone case, their ID, put it inside a wallet, among other possibilities.
• Use of  radio waves to automatically identify a person, collect data about them, and enter that data directly into computer systems.
• The passive tags are the most widely used as they are smaller and less expensive to implement.They transmit data with an RFID reader and they don't need any source of power to send or receive radio frequency.
• Most fixed readers are automated and don’t require human involvement besides the person scanning the “pass” to enter or exit a zone.

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1RTvLhM9QioIwqZFtoi9T4JE9jvIPcU56buQasr5QZsU/edit#slide=id.g8614a0ef90_0_0

What we’re aiming for is to provide useful information to all members across the whole facility. This data will permit staff members such as security and health officers to analyze the situation and apply the required measure to keep up with sanitization standards.

We are also providing a web page with information regarding our solution:

https://www.iso-net.co/

access password : isonet

Bacon, J. B. (2011, enero 1). Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in Space. Recuperado 31 de mayo de 2020, dehttps://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20110014827.pdf

ABR. (2020, mayo 14). Location Tracking For the Future. Recuperado 31 de mayo de 2020, de https://www.abr.com/passive-rfid-tags-vs-active-rfid-tags/

Equipo de Marketing. (2016, junio 2). ¿Qué son las etiquetas RFID? Recuperado 31 de mayo de 2020, de https://tec-mex.com.mx/que-son-las-etiquetas-rfid/

https://www.abr.com/author/marketing/. (2020, febrero 8). 08 Feb Advantages of RFID vs Barcodes. Recuperado 31 de mayo de 2020, de https://www.abr.com/advantages-of-rfid-vs-barcodes/