Announcements & Releases Continued time close together. This spring, when coronavirus infections began to spike, many professional football and basketball teams in the United States were already using sports performance monitoring technology from Kinexon, a company in Munich whose wearable sensors track data like an athlete’s speed and distance.The company quickly adapted its devices for the pandemic, introducing SafeZone, a system that logs close contacts between players or coaches and emits a warning light if they get within 6 feet.The NFL began requiring players, coaches and staff to wear the trackers in September. The data has helped trace the contacts of about 140 NFL players and personnel who have tested positive since September, including an outbreak among the Tennessee Titans, said Dr. Thom Mayer, the medical director of the NFL Players Association. The system is particularly helpful in ruling out people who spent less than 15 minutes near infected colleagues, he added. College football teams in the Southeastern Conference also use Kinexon trackers. Dr. Chris Klenck, the head team physician at the University of Tennessee, said the proximity data helped teams understand when the athletes spent more than 15 minutes close together. They discovered it was rarely on the field during games, but often on the sideline. “We’re able to tabulate that data, and from that information we can help identify people who are close contacts to someone who’s positive,” Klenck said. Civil rights and privacy experts warn that the spread of such wearable continuousmonitoring devices could lead to new forms of surveillance that outlast the pandemic — ushering into the real world the same kind of extensive tracking that companies like Facebook and Google have instituted online.They also caution that A2Z MANUFACTURING SW •
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some wearable sensors could enable employers, colleges or law enforcement agencies to reconstruct people’s locations or social networks, chilling their ability to meet and speak freely. And they say these data-mining risks could disproportionately affect certain workers or students, like immigrants living in the country illegally or political activists. By: Natasha Singer – The New York Times
N.M. SpinLaunch Plans Major Expansion at Spaceport America A company that is developing and testing a mass accelerator with the aim of launching satellites into space orbit, using kinetic energy instead of rockets, is expanding at New Mexico’s Spaceport America,. SpinLaunch signed a lease at Spaceport America in 2019 and has since invested in test facilities and an integration facility. The company is now set to hire an additional 59 highly-paid workers and complete the build of its suborbital centrifugal launch system for its next phase of development. SpinLaunch expects to start test launches in New Mexico in 2021. “Spaceport America is the next frontier for innovation,” Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham said. “It is a magnet for companies on the cutting edge, like SpinLaunch, and New Mexico is glad for their partnership with and investment in our state. Announcements Continued Page 14