Companies around the world are having to look at new ways of safely continuing business as we adapt to the “new normal” of life with the coronavirus.

Amazon has used its AI expertise to create what it calls the Distance Assistant. Using a time-of-flight sensor, often found in modern smartphones, the AI measures the distance between employees.

The AI is used to differentiate people from their background and what it sees is displayed on a 50-inch screen for workers to quickly see whether they’re adhering to keeping a safe distance.

Augmented reality is used to overlay either a green or red circle underneath each employee. As you can probably guess – a green circle means that the employee is a safe distance from others, while a red circle indicates that person needs to give others some personal space.

The whole solution is run locally and does not require access to the cloud to function. Amazon says it’s only deployed Distance Assistant in a handful of facilities so far but plans to roll out “hundreds” more “over the next few weeks.”

While the solution appears rather draconian, it’s a clever – and arguably necessary – way of helping to keep people safe until a vaccine for the virus is hopefully found. However, it will strengthen concerns that the coronavirus will be used to normalise increased surveillance and erode privacy.

Amazon claims it will be making Distance Assistant open-source to help other companies adapt to the coronavirus pandemic and keep their employees safe.

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Social distancing measures around the world appear to be having the desired effect. In many countries, the “curve” appears to be flattening with fewer deaths and hospital admissions per day.

No healthcare system in the world is prepared to handle a vast number of its population hospitalised at once. Even once relatively trivial ailments can become deadly if people cannot access the care they need. Until a vaccine is found, that’s why maintaining social distancing is vital even as lockdown measures ease.

With the curve now flattening, the conversation is switching to how lockdowns can be lifted safely. Contact-tracing apps, which keep track of everyone an individual passes and alerts them to self-isolate if they’ve been near anyone subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19, are expected to be key in easing measures.

MIT’s AI corroborates what many health officials are showing in their figures; that we should now be seeing new cases of COVID-19 levelling off in many countries.

“Our results unequivocally indicate that the countries in which rapid government interventions and strict public health measures for quarantine and isolation were implemented were successful in halting the spread of infection and prevent it from exploding exponentially,” the researchers wrote.

However, the situation could be similar to Singapore where lockdown measures almost completely flattened the curve before an early return to normal resulted in a massive resurgence in cases.

“Relaxing or reversing quarantine measures right now will lead to an exponential explosion in the infected case count, thus nullifying the role played by all measures implemented in the US since mid-March 2020.”

The team from MIT trained their AI using public data on COVID-19’s spread and how each government implemented various measures to contain it. It was trained on known data from January to March, and then was found to accurately predict the spread in April so far.

While the researchers’ work focused on COVID-19 epidemics in the US, Italy, South Korea, and Wuhan, there’s no reason to think that relaxing social distancing rules anywhere else in the world at this stage would be any less dire.

You can find the full paper from MIT here.

(Photo by engin akyurt on Unsplash)

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