Ontario investing in Facedrive Inc. to help protect workers
by CM Staff
Wearable contact tracing manufacturer to help protect protect workers from COVID-19 through the Ontario Together Fund.
Ontario Together Fund assisting manufacturers.
SCARBOROUGH — The Ontario government is providing Facedrive Inc. with $2.5 million through the Ontario Together Fund to accelerate the deployment of its wearable contact tracing technology, TraceSCAN, which alerts users within a workplace who have been in close contact with individuals who have tested positive for COVID-19. The company anticipates manufacturing about 150,000 devices under this project and creating 68 new jobs, including software, firmware and hardware engineers and machine learning specialists.
“In our fight against COVID-19, Ontario is continuing to support companies like Facedrive that are developing the innovative technology that adds new layers of defence against this global pandemic,” said Vic Fedeli, Minister of Economic Development, Job Creation and Trade. “Through the Ontario Together Fund, we will continue to make sure that companies like Facedrive have the resources they need to supply emergency products and innovative solutions during these challenging times, while creating skilled jobs for our province.”
Facedrive developed TraceSCAN’s made-in-Ontario AI-powered solution, which can track staff exposure to COVID-19 without GPS information, in partnership with the University of Waterloo. Workers simply wear the device and the wearable technology will communicate with others within a workplace environment. If users are less than six feet apart, the device beeps to alert the users. If anyone in the working premises reports COVID-19 positive, HR or health and safety officials can log in to the online reporting dashboard and see who they have been in contact with and their risk level, then send an exposure notification. Contact tracing will be made simple with all of the close proximity contact having been recorded.
The technology is designed to help mitigate the spread of COVID-19 for workplaces and settings where smartphone use is limited or prohibited, such as airlines, schools, construction sites, and long-term care homes. It will add another layer of safety and protection through identification and isolation of new COVID-19 cases, tracing back the interactions and helping to stop the contamination.
The province’s initial pandemic response was to procure available stock, the majority of which was from international sources. Over the course of the pandemic, efforts to develop Ontario-based production has resulted in a shift to 74 per cent of PPE purchases being domestically produced (by procurement value). Key categories such as N95 respirators, surgical masks, face shields, wipes, disinfectants and hand sanitizer are all domestically produced at production sites in Ontario.
