Health and Safety Innovations to Reduce the Spread of Contagious Disease

In this paper, we report on a series of design innovation projects conducted by student teams at the University of Colorado at Denver in collaboration with research scientists at the US Air Force Research Lab. The COVID-19 pandemic has made apparent the risks of disease transmission through multiple vectors in public spaces that could potentially benefit from further protection and safety measures. Utilizing formal ideation and innovation methods from the 4D Design Innovation (DI) process, the teams studied what specific problems to solve, explored potential solution ideas, and developed some early-concept prototypes for feasibility demonstration. Design Innovation (DI) provides both an overall process for product design and also methods for each step in the process. This paper details the correlation between the steps in the DI process and the results produced by the teams. The teams primarily focused on minimizing the risk of disease transmission through reducing the physical touching of common public items; additional solutions relating to contact tracing and social distancing were also explored. Initial functional prototypes were developed and demonstrated for: (a) touchless elevator control systems using voice commands, foot pedals, gestures, and touchless buttons; (b) an automated desk usage hygienic management system; (c) an automated remote video person tracker for monitoring compliance with indoor social distancing and room capacity limits; and (d) a contact tracing app. We discuss the prototyped solutions in detail, and describe promising ways forward for developing these technologies, with the aims of combatting the spread of disease and ensuring overall public health, safety, and security.