The news is spreading…
Regular readers of this blog will have noted our recent pivot in focus. Our team are busy working on our thermal screening device and the devices are already out at Beta testing sites helping employers keep their staff safe. We're pleased to share how the media have been taking notice of our efforts. And a look ahead to how we see our solution fitting in with some of the innovations that are being designed to help keep New Zealand safe from further outbreaks.
Our efforts to bring a low cost screening device to market have been noted in a couple of press articles recently:
Newsroom: https://www.newsroom.co.nz/2020/04/17/1129828/from-tracking-critters-to-finding-fevers
It’s always pleasing to see others taking note and we are quite pleased with the progress of the work on our screening device - the early results are promising.
But that’s only part of the solution we're working towards. While developing the product, we are keeping in regular conversation with groups of innovators and entrepreneurs who are working on solutions in a number of areas related to dealing with the presence of COVID-19 in our society.
There are few areas of interest but there are two key things we are focusing on:
Early identification of febrile individuals making for safer workplaces and public spaces – our thermal screening device helps with this
Building a network of screening points and connected devices that can provide a view of the current health of our country
If we achieve our goal of having thousands of devices deployed and actively screening people, we are going to need a centralised place to store and access data collected by screening devices - we call this our Monitoring Platform.
In the next blog entry, we'll describe some of the opportunities that platform will open up and how we will be integrating with some of the key solutions our government will be rolling out to allow tracing.
We'll discuss how we might go about achieving that and how that can help provide a world-leading system for monitoring the spread of infectious diseases (spoiler alert: it's not just our devices that can play a role in this).
If you would like to help this effort in any way, please do get in touch. As always, we welcome your feedback - feel free to share your thoughts in the comments below or you can email us at blog@cacophony.org.nz.
