How Contact Tracing Helped Bay State College Bring Students Back to Campus
Bay State’s contact tracing solution uses HID BEEKs BLE beacons to help calculate the time, place and proximity of faculty, staff and students while on the college’s two campuses.
HID's Bluetooth BEEKs beacons are part of a robust solution that makes it possible to quickly and easily perform contact tracing. (Credit: HID Global)
AUSTIN, Texas — HID Global announces that Bay State College safely brought its students back to its campuses in Boston and Taunton, Massachusetts using a digitized contact tracing solution that includes HID Bluetooth BEEKs beacons to provide real-time location services.
The HID Bluetooth beacon is in the form of a simple badge holder that is used to carry existing ID badges for students, faculty, staff and guests.
The beacons are part of a robust solution that makes it possible to quickly and easily perform contact tracing, removing the manual and time-consuming effort to identify who has been in contact with whom on campus, according to the company.
“Contact tracing is a key component for safely operating our campuses and considered by health departments to be one of the most important efforts to help slow the spread of COVID-19,” says Jeffrey Myers, chief information officer with Bay State College. “HID BEEKS beacons are carried by each person on campus as part of our solution that enabled us to safely resume in-person classes and keep our campus operational should isolated parts of our community find themselves infected.”
The HID BEEKS Bluetooth Low-Energy (BLE) beacons provide the starting data that Bay State’s contact tracing solution uses to calculate the time, place and proximity of faculty, staff and students while on the college’s two campuses.
HID says the information from the beacons enables college administrators to comply with state and local occupancy mandates and, when needed, rapidly respond to cases. Logs are maintained only for the 14-day period required for contact tracing, and the university has adopted strict privacy policy guidelines for data use and access.
“We are very pleased that Bay State College has used HID BEEKs beacons to help streamline and accelerate the often daunting task of contact tracing,” says Mark Robinton, vice president of IoT Services at HID Global. “In addition to creating a completely digitized approach to this process, HID’s offering is part of a broader platform that provides smart building and optimization capabilities that extend well beyond today’s pressing need to stem the spread of COVID-19.”
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