SEC Basketball to use COVID tracking technology

BIRMINGHAM, Alabama (November 17, 2020) – The Southeastern Convention will use KINEXON SafeZone expertise, the identical cutting-edge wearable proximity units utilized in SEC soccer video games, to boost COVID-19 contact tracing efforts throughout the 2020-21 males’s and ladies’s basketball seasons, the Convention introduced Tuesday.

KINEXON SafeZone expertise contains light-weight, wearable units, referred to as SafeTags, which might be used conference-wide for males’s and ladies’s basketball student-athletes throughout practices and video games. The units can even be utilized by officers throughout all SEC males’s and ladies’s basketball video games.

Roughly the dimensions of a watch face, the gadget could be constructed into gear or uniforms to be used on-field in practices and video games.

“We now have been happy with the outcomes produced by means of the KINEXON SafeZone expertise in soccer to help a wholesome surroundings for student-athletes,” stated SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey. “KINEXON continues to offer the SEC with a contemporary and efficient resolution to fulfill the distinctive contact tracing challenges related to athletic competitors in shut contact sports activities.”

SafeZone makes use of ultra-wideband expertise to precisely calculate the proximity between people by distance and size of time in an effort to carry out fast and correct contact tracing when somebody is symptomatic or assessments optimistic for COVID-19. The contact knowledge is logged in a safe system and could be accessed to contact hint within the occasion of an an infection.

“KINEXON SafeZone has performed an important position in mitigating the unfold of COVID-19 inside SEC soccer packages,” stated KINEXON Govt Vice President Jim Garofalo. “Our trusted digital strategy to contact tracing might be a contributing issue which permits the convention’s males’s and ladies’s basketball season to be performed safely. With our resolution, faculty medical officers are empowered to make use of actual knowledge to establish publicity to the virus.”

The SafeTags may also be used to implement bodily distancing laws by flashing a crimson warning mild when individuals are inside six toes of one another.

Contact tracing has lengthy been acknowledged by public well being specialists as one of the vital efficient methods to restrict the unfold of infectious illness. Contact tracing is one factor of a complete SEC COVID-19 administration plan, amongst a set of protocols that make use of testing, bodily distancing and facility sanitization.