Thank you, Mr. Chair and members of the committee.
I’d like to start off by giving you some background about our company, Mapsted. We have been in business since 2014. We’re an award-winning Canadian technology firm that provides highly scalable and accurate location-based solutions inside and outside any building without the use of additional external hardware such as Bluetooth beacons or Wi-Fi connectivity. Instead, our technology uses innovative, adaptive, data-fusion and self-learning algorithms to deliver an accurate and scalable positioning using any off-the-shelf smart phone. This means our technology can work anywhere, including in areas that are usually thought of as “dead zones”, like underground locations or skyscrapers.
We further expanded our core technology and developed an extensive location-based service platform, which includes seamless outdoor-indoor wayfinding, asset tracking, targeted alerts and notifications, analytics, location intelligence and secure contact tracing. We work with a wide variety of businesses and industries, including retail, health care and higher education. Our technology has been recognized as one of the most advanced location-based technologies in the world, with 62 patents granted to date. We have deployed our technology across 255 million square feet worldwide.
Over the last few months, we have seen an unprecedented response from the technology sector to the global spread of COVID-19 in our communities. Most countries have focused on developing technologies to help with contact tracing to try to flatten the curve and also prevent the health care system from becoming overwhelmed.
Singapore was an early adopter of a community-driven contact-tracing app, and now European member states are adopting a decentralized Bluetooth model for contact tracing. In this model, no data is stored centrally, ensuring that it's not possible to reconstruct an individual’s relationships or identity. They are planning an international “roaming” feature that could help revive travel and tourism across the area. Each country would have its own app, but the apps could “talk” to each other and help make travel across the region safer.
Other countries like China went beyond contact tracing and developed additional uses for location technology to help people access products and services during this challenging time by helping them check store levels for masks, sanitizer and gloves at nearby stores and also moving a significant portion of their everyday health care to online consultations.
In addition, they adopted the use of health QR codes to ensure that workplaces that had to remain open were safer. If an employee received a green QR code, they were able to work. A yellow or red code would require self-isolation. Population density maps have also been used to help pinpoint vulnerable populations, large gatherings and, along with some real-time data related to health and travel, to provide citizens with a visual representation of where potential hot spots are likely to occur, helping them to reduce their risk by avoiding those areas.
As we have seen recently, there have been some challenges and concerns with this type of technology, one of the main ones being privacy. Canada is looking to adopt a decentralized model of contact tracing moving forward, which will help address many of the privacy fears that currently exist, but right now, this concern has led to poor adoption rates of the apps, making them less effective. Alberta’s app, for example, has been downloaded by just 200,000 people out of a population of approximately 4.4 million. We need to have approximately 60% of the population using this type of app for it to be effective.
As the country moves to reopen in stages, we need a way to ensure that we can keep our population safe while allowing for Canada’s economic growth to move forward again. Essentially, we need to find a way to safely function in a society with the virus, as we wait for a vaccine to be developed. Location-based technology will play an important role in this process.
First, integrating the digital contact-tracing technology with traditional contact tracers can prove to be more effective in stamping out the virus hot spots and tracking the spread of the disease. Integrating these two approaches ensures that we address the issues inherent to each method. For example, traditional contact tracing has limitations of scalability, notification delays, and contact identification in public spaces. And even if we don’t have full adoption of the digital contact-tracing technology, many of the gaps could be filled by traditional methods, ensuring greater effectiveness overall.
As we get back to using many non-essential services, additional location-based technology can keep us safer. It’s not enough just to ensure that our health care system doesn’t get overwhelmed by COVID-19 cases. We need to work to accommodate patients who need diagnostics and care for other conditions and help them safely and securely access the services they need. Patients must have access to timely cancer screenings, and people with compromised immune systems need a way to safely plan their hospital or clinic visit for treatment so they don’t unnecessarily expose themselves to the virus by coming into prolonged contact with members of the public.
Seamless outdoor-indoor navigation technology, combined with location-based notifications and analytics, can help these patients plan optimized routes, from finding the closest hospital entrance to their appointments to planning the shortest route through the building to multiple appointments in different sections of the hospital. It can further help by sending notifications telling them when it’s safe to enter a waiting area, and giving them instructions detailing any safety precautions that must be followed. Heat maps could also be used to prevent bottlenecks and show the busy areas, so vulnerable patients could avoid walking into a situation that would increase the risk to their health.
This approach would also allow appointments to be spaced out, allow ample time for cleaning before and after patient visits, and help ease the anxiety of such visits significantly, helping to ensure that fewer people put off potentially life-saving tests and treatments because of the fear of getting infected.
Ontario’s upcoming cloud-based case management system, which will connect the lab system with the public health system, is another example of where location-based technology could complement a service to make going to appointments for tests and diagnostics safer. This technology would send patients to labs close to where they live, and use targeted notifications to let patients know when the doctors and technicians are ready for them, so they don’t need to wait with others in a room, potentially increasing their risk of exposure. To address any privacy concerns, all data should be stored locally on each device for a limited period of time, and would be anonymized.
Using location technology in this way would allow people to continue to practise effective social and physical distancing, while allowing them to access the needed services. This type of approach would also work well in malls and big box retail stores. This type of navigation technology would not only give customers the shortest or the most optimized route to the department they need, but it would also lead them directly to the product they are looking for, eliminating the need to wander around the store aisles in frustration trying to locate it. This would help reduce the time people spend inside around groups of other shoppers, reducing their exposure risk.
Many stores, including grocery chains, face problems with lineups as fewer shoppers are being admitted into the store at once. These lines put people in contact with others for longer periods of time as they wait outside. This is especially true ahead of holidays and long weekends. This is where the location-based solutions really shine, by ensuring that essential services like grocery stores can create a safe shopping environment for their customers, enforcing physical distancing measures and reducing the possibility of the spread of the virus. Stores can use this technology to set up a geofence around their location and control foot traffic into the store without any lineups, preventing crowding and bottlenecks.
This technology will continue to play a critical role as we move past the initial measures to help slow the spread of the virus and start to ease restrictions and open more businesses in the transition back to a new normal.
The uses of this technology go far beyond health care or retail applications. Contact-tracing apps can be a trade-off between privacy and effectiveness, but if we integrate this technology with traditional methods, and supplement it with additional location-based products and solutions such as indoor navigation, targeted notifications, geofencing and tagging, they could help more Canadians safely return to work, attend medical appointments, events or extracurricular activities, and much more, as we wait for a vaccine or an effective treatment for COVID-19 to be developed.
Thank you.