JUNE 2020/PRESS RELEASE

DESIGN AND TECHNOLOGY FOR

MEASURING SOCIAL DISTANCING AND

BEHAVIOUR: THE INTEGRATED SOLUTION

BY PININFARINA AND BLIMP

Turin, 8 June 2020 - Design and technology put themselves at the service of preventive healthcare. Pininfarina, which has always been a benchmark for industrial design and mobility, now commits to the search for integrated, ready-to-use solutions for the post-Covid19 era, entering into a strategic partnership with Blimp, a start-up specialising in artificial intelligence and part of e-Novia, the Milan- based 'Enterprises Factory'.

Together, Pininfarina and Blimp offer a solution that integrates physical and digital design, technology and services to analyse people flows and so make it possible to verify and monitor the application of anti-Covid19 containment measures in all indoor and outdoor settings: from public transport to airports and stations, from offices to production plants, shops and large-scale retailers.

According to the agreement reached by the two partners, Pininfarina will dress Blimp technology, integrating into its architectural and industrial design proposals the Beat-19 solution developed by the Milan company. In addition, the Pininfarina Experience Design team, will define the experience within public transport vehicles and spaces as well as interfaces (Apps, displays, Led-walls) dedicated to company personnel and end users. Blimp will be at Pininfarina's side with its service offering enabled by hardware, sensor and platform technologies.

"Design, which has the ability to innovate continuously while enhancing the lives of people in normal times, can provide the response to imagining a new future

  • explains Pininfarina CEO Silvio Angori. - Now, for the first time, Design also needs to be used to awaken feelings of protection. The 'humanization of tech' will

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JUNE 2020/PRESS RELEASE

make people feel re-assured thus reflecting in the way we live, we move, we conduct business. Together with Blimp we can offer a solution that perfectly meets the needs of the "New Normal": designing new spaces and equipping them with digital measuring systems making people feel safer".

"Our partnership with Pininfarina is an extraordinary union between Italian design and technology", comments Blimp founder, Alex Buzzetti. "It is an important step towards the creation of sustainable and intelligent urban environments, permeated by micro-services enabled by Artificial Intelligence technologies and dedicated to improving well-being and quality of life".

What exactly is Beat-19? It is a solution able to monitor the flow of people and ensure that measures to contain the spread of the virus are applied. Beat-19 makes it possible in real time to detect excessive groups of people in public spaces and induce them to disperse by way of acoustic signals; monitor queues of people outside a building or at bus, train or subway stops, and count the number of accesses; measure body temperature and the use of face masks in order to report the presence

of subjects at risk; record the application of security measures, especially social distancing, for example, of staff working in offices or production plants, so that immediate action can be taken.

The technology consists of a sensor for the detection of data and a cloud platform so that the data can be

viewed and notifications of critical situations

(e.g. gatherings of people or absence of face masks) managed. Depending on needs, the sensor can be fitted with a thermal imaging camera to detect body temperature and a speaker to play audio messages and/or acoustic signals to facilitate people dispersion without anyone having to physically intervene. Privacy is key: the images captured by the sensor - which is not a camera - are processed directly inside the sensor and immediately deleted. Only anonymous, aggregated data in the form of numbers reach the central cloud.

The integration of Beat-19 technology with Pininfarina's architecture and industrial design solutions slots into

a research process that the Pininfarina Architecture team began weeks ago with the aim of identifying and designing solutions capable of transforming the different spaces in which everyday life will resume in the post-Covid 19 world. Thanks to Pininfarina's multi- disciplinary expertise, which has over 600 industrial design and architecture projects to its credit, the research is applied to all those contexts in which human interaction risks becoming a vehicle of contagion: from real estate to education, from living to office spaces, from the retail world to hospitality, mobility and public spaces. In designing new spaces, finding the right balance between social distancing and interaction,

the Pininfarina task force is exploring design solutions that make use of integrated technologies such as Beat-19, accompanying it with the analysis of human behaviour and the help of sociologists, psychologists and philosophers that allow the integration of perceptive and behavioural aspects.

Francesco Fiordelisi

Livia Casasole

HEAD OF COMMUNICATIONS, PININFARINA S.p.A.

BLIMP/E-NOVIA

e-mail:f.fiordelisi@pininfarina.it

e-mail:livia.casasole@e-novia.it

tel. 011.9438105

tel. 02.4590 2000

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Pininfarina S.p.A. published this content on 08 June 2020 and is solely responsible for the information contained therein. Distributed by Public, unedited and unaltered, on 08 June 2020 13:37:05 UTC