JUNE 25, 2021 BY ROBERT LEWIS
Last week’s announcement of the 2021 BC Tech award finalists was a who’s who of the Vancouver tech ecosystem – AbCellera, Clio, Dapper Labs, Klue, and Thinkific were all among the shortlisted companies.
But not every company recognized was a household name. Among the finalists for the Excellence in Technology Adoption category is Vancouver’s TraceSafe, one of the few companies that may be under your radar.
TraceSafe quietly emerged in the summer of 2020 thanks to its wearable COVID-19 contact tracing and self-quarantine management technology. TraceSafe’s tech had been deployed across governments, enterprises and even iconic sports tournaments like the 2021 World Junior Hockey Championships.
Interestingly, the medtech company started out tracking maternity wards in New Zealand after the country reported a troubling number of infant abduction cases. Using wristbands, doctors and hospital staff could check a dashboard to see where an infant was on the maternity ward. If one of the babies was taken outside of the ward, a notification was sent to the staff’s mobile phones.
TraceSafe has continued to evolve past their pandemic pivot and now provides its customers with a world-class IoT platform built on its proprietary proximity-tracking technology.
Among the industries that have adopted TraceSafe’s technology are cruise lines where they’ve signed a number of multi-year tech agreements with global tier-1 transportation firms. TraceSafe was also chosen by a Fortune 500 semiconductor manufacturer to implement a wearable safety tech solution across their global footprint of 60,000 workers.
And the company continues to innovate. Last week they announced the release of their new wearable multi-form-factor devices with long-lasting rechargeable batteries, motion recognition chips, and breakthrough machine learning performance thanks to the new machine learning engine.
Customers can now use the machine learning chip in combination with the new ultra-low-power gyroscope and accelerometer to build deep-learning models for motion and human activity recognition scenarios. These models will help enterprises to better understand the movement of people and assets to ensure safety and to provide best-in-class customer experiences.
“We are constantly improving our hardware to meet cutting edge use cases. Having an ability to run machine-learning algorithms directly on devices, helps our clients ensure that sensitive information never needs to be uploaded to the cloud,” said Wayne Lloyd, CEO of TraceSafe.
“At the same time, a platform built on top of edge devices provides our customers with unparalleled performance that cannot be achieved through traditional Cloud-AI methods, especially in environments where connectivity can be an issue.”
TraceSafe is following the lead of technology pioneers like Apple and Qualcomm which are also articulating the benefits of on-device learning.
Lloyd sees a massive opportunity for ML-devices in the B2B market and is looking forward to what its customers can build on top of its powerful IoT software and now the ML-powered hardware.
The company has already shipped the first generation of its intelligent wearables to one of its clients, and is working closely with the customer to build industry-specific apps that can benefit from the device’s new technologies.
By the time the BC Tech Association announces this year’s award winners TraceSafe will likely be a great candidate for next year’s Company of the Year – Growth and Company of the Year – Export categories as well.
In meantime check them out on the Canadian Securities Exchange under the symbol TSF where TraceSafe is publicly traded.
This article originally appeared on Techcouver: https://techcouver.com/2021/06/25/tracesafe-excellence-in-technology-adoption/