Through partnerships announced this week, T-Mobile will provide 4G LTE connectivity for two workplace safety IoT devices that are intended to help curb the spread of coronavirus.
In partnership with PIMMAP, T-Mobile will offer its enterprise clients an infrared contactless temperature sensor that scans up to 40 employees per minute to monitor for coronavirus symptoms such as fever, watery eyes, and fatigue. These metrics can be tied to a particular employee through facial recognition. T-Mobile also partnered with Guardhat, which embeds hardhats with sensors that can alert workers if they violate the six-feet social distancing guideline.
These new partnerships will help T-Mobile address growing enterprise demand for workplace health and safety tools— here are two factors driving this trend:
- US workers still don't feel completely safe in work environments, and workplace health and safety tools may help address these concerns. Of employed US adults, the majority (53%) are still showing up to work at least one day per week during the coronavirus pandemic, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll conducted through May 2020. And of this group of employed US adults still going to work, 49% felt that going to work presented a large or moderate risk to their health and well-being. Low-income workers are particularly vulnerable to these workplace health threats — they are less likely to have paid sick leave or even have funds on hand to cover living expenses during a prolonged absence from work. There have already been major outbreaks within workplaces in the US, such as at a Dole lettuce facility in Ohio, where at least 220 workers contracted the coronavirus.
- Workplace health and safety tools may help limit employers' exposure to lawsuits. Under the Occupational Safety and Health Act, US employers are legally obligated to rid work environments of "recognized hazards" that pose a serious threat to employee health. Companies that fail to utilize workplace health and safety tools may increase their exposure to lawsuits from employees — Amazon, for instance, developed and deployed an AI "distance assistant" just weeks after workers sued the company claiming it did not adequately track the spread of warehouse coronavirus infections.
Despite the potential upside for companies and workers, workplace health and safety monitoring tools also raise worker privacy concerns. Much of the digital infrastructure used to support health and safety monitoring tools will likely remain in place after the pandemic subsides, since it can be used to monitor employee productivity. For instance, IoT systems that monitor a workers' location to enforce social distancing can also be used to monitor productivity by tracking how quickly workers move throughout a facility, and the duration of their lunch and bathroom breaks.
Employee productivity trackers are already widely used by companies such as Amazon, but the pandemic will usher in even broader adoption, which almost certainly won't revert back to pre-pandemic levels. B2B technology providers such as connectivity companies, cloud service providers, and device manufacturers will need to decide the extent to which they are comfortable enabling such technologies, which have the potential for abuse. Failure to adequately navigate this landscape could result in consumer backlash, as it did earlier this year with employee tracking services offered by Facebook and Zoom
