Photo has been used for illustrative purposes.

Imran Mojib, Special Correspondent

The UAE government has taken many great measures to control the COVID-19 pandemic, from establishing several field hospitals to inventing new test methods, all this helped to control the number of new infections. As the number of new patients going down, the responsibility for maintaining this moves to the individuals.

Dr Angelika Eksteen, co-founder and CEO of Dubai-based company AI Directions, said that the UAE residents are waiting for the good, old normal life to return. But, there are rules that need to be obeyed to ensure everyone’s safety, such as wearing a facial mask, and keeping the appropriate safety distance.

“In normal life, it is easy to forget about these things, even for people that are fully aware of the need for such measures. Compliance with these measures become even more essential as a large number of infections result from contacts with people that do not yet show any symptoms,” she said.

The AI Directions has developed AI-based solutions — ‘Eye for Safety’ and ‘Eye on Distance’ — to support the compliance with the safety rules to help the country and its people. ‘Eye for Safety’ is a stand-alone device that can detect the body temperature and whether people are wearing masks or not. It can be placed anywhere at face height and raises alarms if anything is wrong.

‘Eye on Distance’ is a software solution that detects whether people are maintaining safe distances while queuing, shopping, or any other activities, and generates heat maps to identify areas where social distancing is problematic and other solutions should be sought; the use of existing CCTV cameras is possible.

Both solutions work in real time and maintain entire confidentiality of the results, in full compliance with regulations, such as GDPR and the rules in UAE that sensitive data should not leave the country.

Dr Angelika Eksteen said that both the solutions can be used at various places including malls, shops, airports, universities, schools, just anywhere where there is a likelihood that people might be challenged in complying with the COVID-19 rules.