Howard County companies launch a contact-tracing system

By Elise Devlin
Baltimore Watchdog Staff Writer

Three resident companies at the Maryland Innovation Center (MIC) have launched a new  contact-tracing notification system that anonymously monitors users’ movements in a facility to pinpoint potential COVID-19 exposures, officials announced Friday.

The Innovation Center is an initiative of the Howard County Economic Development Authority (HCEDA). The new product, known as NOTIFY, operates within facilities, recording possible worker transmissions while providing alerts to those who may have been exposed to infectious disease.

“NOTIFY gives companies an easy to set-up and operate system for alerting workers of the time, location and duration of interactions with coworkers who are subsequently identified as being potentially contagious,” said Tim Buckley, rfidCollect’s executive vice president. “NOTIFY fills a need for practical workplace safety by providing real-time, actionable data directly to workers so they can assess their own level of exposure risk.”

NOTIFY can be used in almost any building that hosts employee interaction, including industries and organizations such as healthcare, government, defense, pharmaceutical, food processing, manufacturing, data center operations, and corporate offices, officials said.

The system has three main components:

• Badges or wristbands that will be carried or worn by workers
• Notify Locators® placed inside the facility that track where workers meet or interact
• A real-time dashboard for alerts and notifications.

Buckley said the system can usually be installed in one day, with costs starting as low as 50 cents per-day, per-worker. When creating NOTIFY, rfidCollect utilized the technology of Joget, a peer MIC company.

“NOTIFY offers the flexibility to configure the system based on internal process and is fully customizable to achieve organizational goals,” said Raveesh Dewan, CEO of Joget.  “NOTIFY is based on proven low-code platforms developed by our partners and customers.”

rfidCollect also collaborated with Mokxa Technologies to include the Joget platform as part of the NOTIFY system.

“We know the power of low-code platforms like Joget, and it was easy and quick to put together a powerful solution like NOTIFY to help organizations meet their safety needs,” said Parminder Sethi, CEO of Mokxa Technologies.

For the Innovation Center, officials said the partnership between the three member companies, rfidCollect, Joget, and Mokxa Technologies, is the kind of collaboration needed between innovators.

“The collaboration efforts between MIC companies is now commonplace,” said MIC Executive Director Chuck Bubeck.  “These three companies exemplify how the business community can come together to solve pressing global challenges.

“As residents of the MIC, they embody the creativity and hard work that goes into building a cutting-edge solution.  It is solutions like this that will continue to put the region on the map for innovation,” he said.