IK Multimedia, the Italian company better known for its products and accessories for musicians, has launched a new product that has nothing to do with music. It’s called Safe Spacer, and it’s a lightweight wearable device meant to help people keep proper social distancing in large workplaces such as factories, warehouses, or big offices.
Each Safe Spacer detects when another person wearing a matching device from the same organization is coming within 2 meters (but that can be customized), alerting each wearer with a vibration, a sound, or a display of led lights on the watch face.
According to IK Multimedia, the device works ten times better than Bluetooth at assessing proximity, and it even offers an option to store collision data (how many times a device encountered another unit) to “monitor compliance or perform fast contact tracing.” The Safe Spacer doesn’t have to be carried as a watch. The main unit can be attached to a lanyard or a belt clip to adapt to each worker’s preference or specific security protocols.
Deploying the Safe Spacer in large organizations is relatively cheap: each unit costs 85€ (or 99$), while a single S-Charger with 25 charging bays costs 270€ (299$). Data from the Safe Spacer units can be extracted via USB directly or through the charger in bulk. IK Multimedia provides an additional S-Bridge (120€ or 139,99$) that can be placed at key entry points to download data wirelessly as the workers pass by.