The impact of COVID-19 has been devastating across sectors and industries. As the world is trying hard to restore normalcy, technology plays the role of a critical enabler, not just by helping most businesses continue with routine functioning, but also by providing safe environments for their workers and customers to return.

Different challenges have emerged impacting various cross-sections of society, including citizens and city administrations, employees and employers, retail stores and their customers, passengers and airports, patients and hospitals, and so forth. Key issues include lack of information on workers’ health status, timely updates on the outbreak and preparedness, mitigating the spread of fake news and content, observing social distancing rules, ensuring the availability of essential services, etc. Although markets have seen isolated solutions in various pockets address some of these challenges, there is an evident lack of a cohesive, strategic approach to the problem at hand as we struggle for clarity on the immediate future.

At Wipro, we have proactively designed a customizable value proposition to address these challenges and ensure business continuity. Wipro’s inventive Health COV-ER is a ready to deploy, cloud-based solution powered by Wipro’s Smart i-Connect™ IoT platform — a one-stop solution offering multiple use cases integrated under one umbrella. This dynamic solution provides a plethora of relevant features and comprises different themes based on users, challenges, and associated safety measures. Features across all themes include health declaration, thermal scanning, social distancing, face mask alert, crowd avoidance, occupancy monitoring, chatbot, and live chat support for pandemic-related policies and concerns. Themes include:

• City and Hospitals – Features include citizen connect, trusted communication, health check, nearby health facilities, hospital asset tracking, and inventory management.
• Back to Workplace – Features for workplaces include health assessment, seat booking, social distancing, contact tracing, crowd avoidance, and facility sanitization. Also integrates with the thermal scanning and access control systems.
• Shop with Safety – For retail stores and branch offices with a focus on customer walk-ins, employees returning to the workplace, customer occupancy control process, and queue management.
• Back to Normalcy with Safety – For airports, malls, hotels, public places, and large campuses, covering employees, passengers, and customers. Additional features include Bluetooth-based social distancing, virtual queue management and navigation, mass thermal scanning, sanitization scheduling, and more.

Benefits of Wipro’s Health COV-ER solution include:

• SaaS-based model hosted on public cloud with less upfront investment and ‘pay per use’ flexibility
• Available in Ready to Deploy mode and quickly customizable to meet specific requirements in weeks rather than months
• System-driven, agile process–based solution with centralized dashboards for pandemic management
• Easy access to regulations or essential information via searchable updates
• Mobile app for end-users and centralized console for administrators
• Modular solution offers flexibility to implement priority use cases and add features on demand

This solution integrates various systems smoothly to acquire data and enables monitoring and management with minimal or touchless human intervention. It includes automated rules-based incidence creation and SOP based workflows. The contactless architecture and smart analytics reduce the need for human intervention and enable quicker responses. 

Whether a second wave of the pandemic is likely to occur and how it could influence the way we work in the coming months is still unknown. As businesses start re-opening, having a safe and compliant environment, and handling future pandemics will be crucial. A flexible, iterative solution that addresses current challenges and offers future-proofing is an investment that organizations must make.

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