InnovationLab’s Printed Organic Sensor ‘Smart Mat’ Targets Social Distancing in Retail Settings
June 25, 2020
The company is now demonstrating its smart mat in a retail store in Heidelberg, Germany.
InnovationLab, a creator of printed electronics, released the “smart mat,” a sensor-based distance-control floor mat that helps to ensure social distancing in retail outlets. While existing systems monitoring shoppers’ locations and the number of people in a store typically use cameras, such systems are limited by accuracy and privacy issues.
Leveraging InnovationLab’s capacity to print high-accuracy, high-volume roll-to-roll electronics, the smart mat demonstrator uses a sensor array to control a traffic light-style indicator which detects when a shopper stands on it. In a simple use case, the smart mat displays a red light when a person is standing on the mat, and green when no one is there, signaling that the next customer can proceed.
InnovationLab is now demonstrating its smart mat in a retail store in Heidelberg, Germany (See Image). The intelligent sensor matrix embedded in the smart mat features more than 8,000 individual sensors spaced at 1 cm intervals, which enables differentiation between human steps and the wheels of a grocery cart, for example. In addition to promoting safe social distancing in a retail environment, the smart mat platform could be further customized to analyse in-store traffic.
