LITMIR.BIZ

FIGURE 1.6 Pandemic impact on airline travel in the Fall of 2020.

In the work environment, social distancing takes the form of physical/desk distancing in support of OSD and ODCMA. A 6‐ft/2‐m goal becomes a defacto standard for a large number of venues. In addition, a number of firms have installed higher cubicle partitions, told employees to wear masks when not at their desks, and set up one‐way aisles in the office that force people to walk the long way around to get to the kitchen or the bathroom; other firms have instituted staggered shifts (e.g. half the staff comes in on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the other half on Tuesdays and Thursdays), deployed spaced‐apart desks in open spaces, eliminated break rooms, placed sanitizer in many prominent office locations, and have been subjecting employees to daily questions about their health [47]. The “de‐densification” impacts many factors (e.g. policies, economics, profitability, occupancy, real estate utilization, sustainability). For example, as of late Summer 2020, a real estate trade group estimated the occupancy rate for many office towers in downtown Boston or New York at around 5–7%, and 10–30% in the suburbs. Of course, “de‐densification” also impacts network connectivity services and architectures; however, wireless technologies, including wireless sensor networks and the IoT, have been advantageously harvested to address and manage these pressing distancing issues (even contact tracing).

Real‐Time Location Systems (RTLSs)⁴ are wireless systems employed to automatically identify and possibly track the location of objects or people in real time, within a building, or in other constrained or defined spaces (for example, in campuses, in wide‐area/regional spaces, or worldwide). These signals are typically electromagnetic: RF systems are common, but some systems use optical/infrared mechanisms (other signals can also be used in confined spaces). Position is derived by measurements of the physical properties of the radio link.

      Automatic wireless monitoring is prevalent in a variety of industries, where location and other characteristics of a product or environment must be tightly monitored for safety or regulatory reasons, such as hospitals; other environmental parameters may be significant due to the nature of the items or processes (e.g. manufacturing processes) monitored. Factors such as humidity, exposure to light, motion sensors, positional location within a predetermined area, and orientation of the product (e.g. whether or not it is upright) may be important. RTLSs have thus gained popularity and are now seen as a “mainstream product” [48]; these systems are especially popular in the healthcare industry for applications ranging from asset tracking through patient and staff tracking, environmental or patient sensing (e.g. temperature), hygiene compliance, elopement (i.e. a patient leaving a facility without authorization), and theft prevention. They also have applications in de‐densification of the office for OSD/ODCMA use cases.

      Conceptually, there are four classifications of RTLS [49]: