COVID 19 has shown that necessity is truly the mother of invention.

In the early days of lockdown 2020, Innovate UK, the UK's Innovation Agency ran a fast-track competition to the UK tech community for ideas to improve the UK's resilience to COVID 19.

Leveraging our experience of real-time digital signs, Innovate UK funded us to investigate enabling any web-connected screen to display real-time, hyper-local COVID 19 related data with the aim of solving several inter-connected problems:

Every place needs to give out visitor advice, but this keeps changing and can be confusing.
Posters and other printed materials are rubbish for the environment, obsolete when advice changes and create confusion when left up against more current advice.
Local authorities, in the front line of managing and enforcing local lockdowns and guidelines, have a limited toolset to communicate with their communities in real-time.
COVID Apps will probably only reach 20-30% penetration of UK Smartphone users if our European cousins' experience is anything to go by. Several higher risk groups, including the elderly and lower-income, are less likely to own smartphones or access to the necessary technology to access COVID apps.

The basic premise of our idea mirrors internal research undertaken by TfL, correlating the increase in public transport usage with the introduction of a digital sign. The notion being that presenting real-time information to people will nudge them to a preferred choice. Our proposition is that displaying real-time COVID 19 information and advice will nudge people to make small behavioural changes; reducing the risk to themselves and others. Building on this, our idea is for every place in the UK to easily display a pre-defined, real-time smart COVID digital sign tailored for their specific location and place 'type'.

Low cost, rapid distribution of information is critical for managing COVID risks which is why we propose leveraging the huge existing networks of connected screens across our communities, supported by delivering signs as URLs meaning no specialist knowledge or implementation is needed.

To determine if our idea had legs, how it would integrate, what it would display and identify a viable commercial model we spoke to DOOH (Digital Out Of Home) Networks, Content Management System platforms, hardware suppliers, Local Authorities, Transport Operators, data suppliers, signage marketplaces, major retailers and Government bodies. Involving partners on our journey helped nuance the software and engaging the needs of multiple stakeholders helped us design a better product.

Increasingly on the front line of managing local lockdowns. We believe Authorities should look to their communities for information distribution. In schools, hospitals, sports centres, offices, shopping centres, hotels and elsewhere there are connected screens which could be utilised to display hyper-local content, emergency notifications and more. Brands could also sponsor signs for use in their chosen target market whilst multi-venue organisations could benefit from managing real-time COVID signage across their estate.