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SERVICE CREATION FOR RE-NORMALISING ESSENTIAL BUSINESS ENVIRONMENT: A PREVENTION BASED DIGITAL TECH APPROACH

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2021

Santosh Maurya*
Affiliation:
Service Computing Research Dept., Center for Technology Innovation - Digital Technology, R&D Group, Hitachi Ltd.
Tezuka Shin
Affiliation:
Service Computing Research Dept., Center for Technology Innovation - Digital Technology, R&D Group, Hitachi Ltd.
Kentaro Watanabe
Affiliation:
Service Computing Research Dept., Center for Technology Innovation - Digital Technology, R&D Group, Hitachi Ltd.
Hiroshi Nakagoe
Affiliation:
Service Computing Research Dept., Center for Technology Innovation - Digital Technology, R&D Group, Hitachi Ltd.
*
Maurya, Santosh Kumar, Hitachi, Ltd., Center for Technology Innovation - Digital Technology, Japan, santosh.maurya.qd@hitachi.com

Abstract

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This research investigates service creation in/after effect of coronavirus pandemic targeting the essential business environment. It follows prevention through design approach to facilitate business owners to maintain their business environments at low COVID contraction risks, for both customers and staff. The effectiveness of recommended prevention practices (like social distancing and hand-sanitising) is uncertain at public workplaces, simply due to inevitable workers and customers interactions. Such uncertainty, especially in cases of retail stores and hospitals, raises a need for the design of services and support systems for common/necessary public business activities to reduce the burden on people involved. This research investigates the risk-related metrics to realise such digital services, focussing on three types: congestion at the work environment, disinfection of store area/objects, and sanitisation of people and staffs involved. Based on this, a digital technology-based service COVSAFE was created and tested through a proof-of-concept implementation for a supermarket business environment. This implementation and its evaluations highlight the bottlenecks/challenges for realising this system in everyday scenarios.

Type
Article
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - NCCreative Common License - ND
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is unaltered and is properly cited. The written permission of Cambridge University Press must be obtained for commercial re-use or in order to create a derivative work.
Copyright
The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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