As cities across the world ease Coronavirus lockdown restrictions, it is important to ensure that elevators used by millions of people every day remain a comfortable, efficient and secure way of transportation. thyssenkrupp Elevator offers several options to create a clean and healthy car environment, aiming to reduce the risk of virus transmissions.
To ensure peace of mind for passengers, the company is focusing on three pillars: hygiene technologies, social distancing, and touchless technologies to prevent infection in elevators and escalators in public places. Many of the resulting innovations will remain relevant even after the pandemic.
“The pandemic is definitely accelerating some interesting trends in the elevator industry. thyssenkrupp Elevator is well equipped for the current challenges. We have been exploring several technologies in recent years, such as smart spaces monitoring, remote operation, robots for sanitizing spaces and many more. Today, we have appropriate solutions to protect passengers during the pandemic. Moreover, we also provide innovative technologies for tomorrow that go beyond today’s urban mobility,” says Peter Walker, CEO of thyssenkrupp Elevator.
Regarding the first pillar “clean technologies”, the offerings range from handrail sanitization to thermal cameras to detect infected passengers. To clean the air in the cabins efficiently, thyssenkrupp Elevator uses air purification with special filters as well as UV-based solutions. “Touchless technologies” are highly relevant, too. Using a special kick button the passenger can call a cabin with a simple toe tap instead of touching a pad or button by hand. Experts foresee that touchless technologies will achieve a high adaption in many areas. Forwardingthinking technologies like the kick button are therefore solutions that are here to stay.
“Social Distancing” as the third pillar of thyssenkrupp’s strategy to fight the pandemic has led to the development of a special Social Distancing Service including traffic monitoring for elevator systems. This service helps tenants stay safe by limiting elevator passengers per cabin, so physical distance can be maintained. With the Social Distancing Service, thyssenkrupp Elevator assesses the elevator traffic to help balance building congestion risks with social distancing needs. Based on the needs, the company changes the dispatching software to limit the number of passengers assigned to each elevator car. Using data captured by the predictive maintenance IoT solution MAX, thyssenkrupp also provides data and information about traffic changes, so passenger wait times and social distancing needs can be balanced.