Health Greeter Kiosk: Tech-Enabled Signage to Encourage Face Mask Use and Social Distancing

Abstract

COVID-19 has been the cause of a global health crisis over the last year. High transmission rates of the virus threaten to cause a wave of infections which have the potential to overwhelm hospitals, leaving infected individuals without treatment. The World Health Organization (WHO) endorses two primary preventative measures for reducing transmission rates: The usage of face masks and adherence to social distancing [World Health Organization 2021]. In order to increase population adherence to these measures, we designed the Health Greeter Kiosk: A form of digital signage. Traditional physical signage has been used throughout the pandemic to enforce COVID-19 mandates, but lack population engagement and can easily go unnoticed. We designed this kiosk with the intent to reinforce these COVID-19 prevention mandates while also considering the necessity of population engagement. Our kiosk encourages engagement by providing visual feedback which is based on analysis from our kiosk's computer vision software. This software integrates real-time face mask and social distance detection on a low-budget computer, without the need of a GPU. Our kiosk also collects statistics, relevant to the WHO mandates, which can be used to develop well-informed reopening strategies.