Skanska Sees Benefits of Worker Tracking Tech on California Hospital Project
Triax’s clip helped Skanska maintain social distancing on an essential project.
PHOTO COURTESY TRIAX TECHNOLOGIES
Working through the COVID-19 pandemic has brought many new technologies into standard use. Triax Technologies adapted its worker-tracking systems to monitor social distancing and handle contact tracing on site. Now Skanska USA foresees benefits for the technology beyond the pandemic era.
“Honestly I don’t think the world was ready for COVID-19, but Triax was there within weeks,” says Robert Hartelust, Skanska USA project executive and senior project manager for the CHA Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center Acute Care Center addition in Los Angeles. When COVID-19 regulations came down from the state government in March 2020, Hartelust adopted Triax’s wearable Proximity Trace clips to log worker locations on site, in addition to the safety monitoring Spot-r clips. “It provided us the data to do trace mapping at the end of the day. It’s really hard to say how we would have done it differently,” says Hartelust.
The location data allowed Skanska to track when workers came into close contact for COVID tracing. But Hartelust says the deployment of nearly 250 wearable tracers provided so much useful data on population density on site that he hopes they will be more widely used even as pandemic-related restrictions are lifted. “It’s really allowed us to have some visibility and transparency on safety trends,” he says. “We’ve actually started avoiding near misses that were affecting safety.”
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